


Sharing Silences

by Enclave



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (kinda), Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Asthma, Augmentative and Alternative Communication, Autism, Autistic Bucky Barnes, Deaf Steve Rogers, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Nonverbal Bucky Barnes, Nonverbal Communication, Sensory Processing Disorder, Slow Burn, Wordcount: 10.000-30.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-10
Updated: 2018-10-16
Packaged: 2019-07-28 21:37:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 26,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16250270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enclave/pseuds/Enclave
Summary: Steve's first meeting with James, his group project partner for his geology class, is a disaster. He knew writing a partner paper wasn't going to be much fun, but he hadn't counted on James being taciturn and standoffish to the point of rudeness. He leaves their first meeting offended and annoyed, wondering if James was short with him because he's Deaf.Then he finds out that James is fluent in ASL and decides to give him another chance. Steve has no idea how far that second chance will go.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Important note on dialogue: italics with quotes = sign language. Italics without quotes = written words. No italics with quotes = audible speech, including AAC/text-to-speech.
> 
> Welcome to the disability-centric college AU nobody asked for! I really hope you guys enjoyed this because I had SO much fun writing it. I'll post it a chapter or two at a time over the next few days--I don't have an exact count but it's got around 6-8 chapters depending on how I divide them up.
> 
> I researched & learned some ASL for this fic, but I am not personally fluent and don't know anybody who is. If you have any pointers for me please leave a comment or message me at singular (hyphen) they (dot) tumblr (dot) com! I will be forever grateful.

Steve heaves a deep, put-upon sigh as he tosses his backpack onto a table on the group-work side of the library. He doesn't remember why he decided to meet his project partner here. The background noise of the other groups of students debating their various projects will make it even harder for him to unscramble what little sound he gets through his hearing aids. He sets his soy latté on the table and digs his geology notebook out of his backpack, flipping it open to a blank page.

Honestly, he has no idea why he thought geology, of all things, would be a good class to take for his natural sciences credit. He could be hanging out in Natasha's room right now and chatting with her in sign language instead of being forced to speak out loud. He could be listening to her latest boy problems or teaming up against Sam in Mario Party. But here he is instead, in the library. Doing geology. Suffering.

The geology class is tiny. Four of the other students are geology majors who are actually passionate about rocks, and their unreasonable enthusiasm makes it even harder for Steve to drag himself out of bed at seven in the morning, three days a week, to listen to Dr. Hewitt's dry lectures at eight. To be fair, the professor clearly cares about the class material and is trying to make it engaging... hence the group project. It's not a presentation; that would be too easy. It's a partner paper. Their topic is schist.

This brings Steve to his partner. Steve knows almost nothing about him; in fact, he can't even bring his name to mind right now. The guy sits in the front left corner of the tiny classroom every day, at the desk closest to the door. This puts him diagonally in front of Steve. Whenever Steve makes noise in class, like the time he accidentally knocked his Intercultural Communication textbook off his desk and it slammed to the ground so loudly even Steve could hear it, the guy glances back at Steve nervously, like it puts him on edge just to know there are people behind him. He wonders if the guy would be more comfortable in the _back_ of the classroom, but he has chosen his spot and he clearly intends to stick with it.

The guy--James, Steve suddenly remembers, that's his name--usually comes to class in sweats and a t-shirt, but not like he just rolled out of bed and didn't bother to put real clothes on. He's invariably freshly showered, his long, dark hair still damp. He sits curled over his notebook, clicking his pen or fidgeting with the spiral wire in the notebook and taking notes or doodling in the margins. He's very quiet and usually comes to class, sits through the entire lecture, and leaves without saying a single word. Steve honestly can't be sure he's ever heard him speak, though since he can't see his face during class, he might make comments that Steve just can't hear.

They were probably paired up by the professor for this project because they have one thing in common: they're the only two students in the class who aren't geology majors. Steve is studying Peace and Conflict Studies and minoring in Fine Arts. (He thought there might be some kind of curricular overlap between geology and ceramics. He was completely, totally wrong.) James is studying Mathematics, according to his entry in the school directory where Steve looked him up earlier, which also, by the way, features an embarrassingly bad photo of him. He's glaring at the camera and looks like he hasn't slept in a week, his long hair tangled and a sweatshirt almost hanging off one shoulder, exposing a sliver of bare chest with some outstanding collarbones. It's not like the dude is a Calvin Klein model (well, maybe under the sweat pants he is, what does Steve know), but he's attractive in a mysterious, eccentric way that is not at all captured by his student ID photo.

Anyway, Steve is pretty sure he's seen him in one or two of his art classes as well, so he might be minoring in art too.

So, the summary of everything Steve knows about James so far: extremely quiet, borderline invisible dude who's been in at least two of Steve's classes and has made very little impression on him whatsoever, beyond "That guy looks like he doesn't want to be spoken to." And now they have to write a paper together.

Steve tries to have a good attitude as he takes a long sip of his latté. It's just a short little report.

A quick little seven-page paper.

On schist.

Yeah, this is gonna be great.

 

* * *

The meeting goes even worse than Steve expected, if that's possible.

James shows up at the doors of the library exactly at their appointed meeting time, two in the afternoon on the dot. He looks around, finds Steve at the table, and walks over. As he approaches, Steve waves to him. There's no response, so Steve says, "Hi, James. Ready to get started?"

James just nods, then a second later, in a weirdly delayed response, waves to Steve. He keeps his head down as he settles himself at the table, pushing his hair behind his ears and frowning into his lap. Damn. The dude really isn't giving Steve a whole lot to work with here.

Steve pushes the essay prompt onto the table between them. The class he had before this meeting got out early, so after he finished whining to himself about how much he didn't want to do a stupid group project and he already _knows_ how to work on a team for God's sake, he managed to come up with a division of the parts of the essay that will let them work independently, then meet up again over the weekend to put their parts together and finalize the essay.

Steve explains his plan to James, who nods and notes down the parts of the project Steve assigned to him without further comment. "So... does this work for you?" Steve prompts, since James hasn't actually agreed to the division of labor. He's annoyed at James' unresponsiveness, like he's distracted by something infinitely more interesting than Steve and the schist essay, which... actually seems reasonable, when he puts it like that.

James nods again. He keeps reaching up to touch his ears. At first, Steve thought he was re-tucking his hair behind his ears. He has a lot of it, and it seems to prefer falling about his face to staying back neatly. But the way he does it is more like he's _covering_ his ears for a second, before he pulls his hands away, and he makes a slightly pained face when he does it. The way he's acting, Steve wonders if he's sick, or maybe even hungover. James doesn't seem like the type to go out and get totally wasted to the point of being hung over at two in the afternoon in the middle of the week, though.

"Thanks," James says finally. "Looks... good." His voice sounds weird, like he's articulating super carefully, and he kind of winces. And then he just leaves without starting on the essay or anything. Steve had thought while they were both in the library, they could at least start writing together and share sources, but clearly James had other plans.

Steve watches him go, more than a bit offended. Then he figures, if they're not going to get started on the project right now, he might as well pencil it in for tomorrow and go figure out what Natasha is doing. He's a little bit less mad by the time he gets to her room and finds her trying to cook some kind of traditional Russian soup dish she claims to remember from her upbringing in the weird ballet cult, using her illegal dorm microwave, and at any rate, trying to prevent Nat from poisoning herself with practically-raw potatoes (not that Steve is much of a chef himself, but he's _pretty sure_ they should at _least_ be cooked until no longer crunchy) is a good enough distraction that he forgets all about the obnoxious meeting.

* * *

 

That Saturday, Steve and Natasha head to one of the art rooms in the mid-morning to study. It's a small room connected to the college's art museum. The walls and floor are covered in gorgeous, multicolored stone tiles, and it's always full of freestanding easels and the scattered art supplies of the Fine Arts students who draw here. This is where Steve prefers to work through his drawing assignments. His class is doing challenging still-lifes with drapery and flowers, and Steve has commandeered an end-table in this room where he piles a bunch of miscellaneous objects to draw them. Today he's doing lilies in the folds of an old sweatshirt.

The room is usually peaceful and quiet; few people use it, despite that it's always left unlocked for art students who want to work at odd hours. Natasha has said she can occasionally hear people talking about the art exhibits outside in the public part of the museum, but Steve's hearing isn't good enough to pick up on it, so to him the room is silent. Golden light streams in through a large skylight as well as a bank of east-facing windows.

It's a meditative place for Steve to finish off his last assignment for the still-life portfolio due next week. Natasha came with him to work on her neurobiology homework and study for an upcoming quiz; she's working quietly in a small empty patch at a table near him, re-reading sections of the textbook.

They've been there for about an hour, and Steve is immersed in his work, when James walks in.

They both whip around in surprise--well, Natasha hears the door open and turns around, and Steve turns when he sees her turn--and there he is, standing in the doorway and blinking into the sunlight. He really is unfairly cute considering how badly they get along, Steve thinks with the part of his brain that isn't admiring him.

James doesn't seem to notice them at first, since they're seated near one wall and partially hidden by all the easels. He's wearing a bulky pair of headphones, so presumably he's listening to music too loudly to hear them. When he does catch sight of them, he stares at them both like a deer in headlights for a moment. Steve waves tentatively, since they _do_ still have to finish the seven-page schist paper and it'll be easier if they can at least pretend to get along. James waves back, his face blank.

He crosses the room and wedges himself into a corner under the windows. He's carrying his battered black backpack, and he sets it down and pulls out a heavy textbook, a notebook of graph paper, two pencils, and one of those fancy calculators with a lit-up screen. Then he gets out a little toy that looks like a colorful snake, or rather an ouroboros, because it's connected in a loop. He lines everything up in front of him, flips open the textbook, and starts scratching in the notebook. Steve, distracted, notes absently how the morning light brightens his brown eyes to an attractive gold color...

"Hey," Natasha says out loud. Once she's got his attention, she signs, _"Do you know him?"_

Steve sets down his pencil. _"Yes,"_ he signs back, chagrined. _"We're working on a geology project together, a partner paper. I don't think he likes me much. I don't like him either."_

_"What makes you say that?"_

_"He barely said two words to me when we met to work on it. Actually, he'd hardly even look at me, and he left as soon as he possibly could. I think he might've heard I'm hard of hearing and assumed that means I can't communicate."_ Steve makes an extremely sour face. He's been ruminating on this idea and it bothers the hell out of him. He can talk perfectly fine, and he's a good lip-reader. He's willing to put in plenty of effort to make conversation with hearing people, even though he vastly prefers to sign. But a lot of hearing people won't pay him the courtesy of meeting him halfway and prefer to talk to their hearing friends, or try to make Natasha, who's a hearing CODA and fluent in sign, translate for them. It's infuriating.

 _"I know him from Intro to Composition,"_ Natasha says. Intro to Composition is a required class to teach all freshmen how to write essays. It also includes social meetings where the freshmen are supposed to talk about how they're adjusting to college. The purpose is to identify freshmen who have trouble adjusting and might drop out so they can get resources to help, and ultimately to improve the college's retention rate. _"I think you may have misunderstood him,"_ Nat signs.

_"Misunderstood how?"_

_"He..."_ Nat glances over at James, considering her next words, or possibly checking to see if James can see her pointing. Luckily, they're both hidden from him by Steve's easel, so even if James could sign he couldn't see what they're saying. _"He doesn't talk much. It's kind of hard for him."_

Steve raises his eyebrows in surprise, picking up on Nat's implication. For some reason it didn't occur to him that James' behavior could be due to a disability. That was... pretty rude of him, actually. Maybe he should have given him the benefit of the doubt. _"Why?"_

_"It's not my place to say. Maybe you should ask him about it."_

Steve squints at James from behind his easel. Perhaps Steve _did_ misjudge him, but James is still standoffish as hell, and Steve's not sure if they'll be having any personal conversations about their problems anytime soon, especially after Steve was kind of short with him at their earlier meeting. He returns to his sketch, though he finds himself glancing at James every once in a while. Okay, maybe a little more than every once in a while. James seems to be hyperfocused on whatever he's noting down in his notebook, and he barely even moves for the next hour. The way the light catches his hair and eyes is hypnotic. And distracting. Possibly Steve stares at him once for so long without moving that Nat elbows him and asks if he's okay with a little smirk. Steve kicks her lightly on the ankle. _"Shut up."_ Standoffish or not, the guy is cute. There's nothing wrong with enjoying it.

* * *

As if the whole situation with James could get any weirder, later that Saturday, while Steve is in the middle of trying to get Nat to stop psychoanalyzing everyone in her neuroscience class ( _"He's a redneck, but I think it's, like, ironic." "Nat, for the love of God..."_ ) he gets an email from James. It's weirdly formal, opening with "Hello Steve" and including a full signature block with James' email address and major. It's a request to move their meeting on Sunday to the art room, where James had run into Steve and Nat earlier, rather than the library where they had met before. Steve would prefer that too, since it'll be easier to hear in the art room than in the library. He shoots back a short email (with no greeting and no signature except "--Steve") agreeing to the change.

When he gets to the room on Sunday morning, it's empty except for James, who's sitting in the same back corner he was in yesterday. Instead of math homework spread out in front of him, he has his laptop and a few printed sheets of paper.

"Hi," Steve says, sitting down in front of him.

James waves, then holds out a tablet to Steve. It takes Steve a moment to figure out why: James has the notes app up, and in it is typed, _I didn't mention this yesterday, but normally I talk to people using a text-to-speech app. Is that ok?_

That makes sense, if he has some disability that makes it hard for him to talk. "Sure. No problem."

James takes his tablet back, spends a few moments furiously typing, and a synthesized voice says, "I thought we could work together in a Google doc." The delay is odd, and it's a little hard to understand through Steve's hearing aid, but that's already more words than he's ever heard James say in a row, so if the app makes it possible for them to actually communicate Steve is all for it.

James turns his laptop around and shows Steve that he's already pasted his part of the essay in, and has included headings for Steve's parts. Steve will just have to paste in his work from his own laptop and clean up the transitions between their separate paragraphs, and then they'll be done with the stupid schist essay. This way their task will only take fifteen or twenty minutes, and then Steve can stop thinking about schist. At least until 8 in the morning on Monday.

But first things first. "That looks great," Steve says. "Listen, I wanted to apologize for being rude last time we met. I really don't like this class and I think I took it out on you. So, I'm sorry." He absently signs sorry along with his words.

James gives him a confused look, which is not exactly what Steve was going for. Then he signs, _"Do you sign?"_

Wait, what?

 _"Yes,"_ he signs, _"I'm Deaf."_

 _"I sign too!"_ James says. He's still not looking at Steve, but he is _grinning_. His smile lights up the room. The shift in James' demeanor throws Steve completely off balance, in a good way. James taps his fingers against his thighs, excited. He doesn't give any explanation for how he learned; maybe he's hard of hearing himself and that's why he doesn't speak. Before Steve can ask, James goes on to show Steve his sign name, which is similar to the sign for "quiet", but with B handshapes.

 _"Why B?"_ Steve asks.

 _"I go by Bucky,"_ he spells. _"It's from my middle name."_

 _"Neat,"_ Steve says, and shows his own sign name, an "S" tapped against his shoulder.

They work on the project together for about a half hour. Steve should be bored, but the mood is about four hundred times lighter than it was before. They stitch together their pieces in no time, signing back and forth about the transitions, then go back and revise. Steve is happy to find that although Bucky doesn't talk, he can certainly write. He even catches him editing Steve's sections in the shared document, correcting his spelling and grammar in a few places. _"What, you think I can't spell?"_ Steve signs to him jokingly. Bucky looks taken aback and sincerely apologizes until Steve says he's just kidding, at which point he gives a startled laugh.

When they finish, Bucky says he has to go; he's meeting his friend Bruce to see a movie. He scowls as he says it. _"Not a movie fan?"_ Steve asks, and Bucky just signs, _"Loud."_ He packs up his prodigious amount of stuff into the black backpack, but says goodbye to Steve with a smile before leaving. It's interesting: when they were sitting right across from each other, Bucky seemed shy, mostly watching Steve's hands and not his face. But while he's leaving, he turns his crooked, adorable smile directly onto Steve and looks him in the eye, and Steve can't help but smile back.

And, yeah, okay, he thinks he might be ready to revise his first impressions.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A handful of autism-related words got redlined in this chapter and I realized some people might not know them! So I put a tiny vocab lesson in the endnotes if you're in that boat; just skip by it if not. Hope that's helpful & not too distracting :)
> 
> Thanks for the comments and encouragement so far!!

Bucky's pretty sure nobody except him enjoys the timing of geology, but he doesn't mind having an eight-a.m. class. He can't sleep in past seven anyway, so he might as well get his day started early. And he likes the early morning quiet, having the dorm showers all to himself, and the peaceful walk around the perimeter of the quad in the chilly morning air down to the sciences building. He actually leaves his dorm early sometimes so he can walk the long way around the quad, listening to the classical music he's always trying to get Bruce into and stimming.

So he's in a fantastic mood when he steps into the hallway outside the geology classroom on Monday, still five or ten minutes early for class, and finds Steve sprawled on the floor there, elbow-deep in his backpack.

His first thought is, _Oh, that's Steve. I can actually recognize him._ He's so faceblind that this is genuinely surprising. Granted, there aren't that many other people who could be sitting outside the geology classroom at this hour, but still! He's managed to look Steve in the face enough to figure out who he is without a whole lot of staring and complicated inductive reasoning. Success!

His second thought is _Shit_ , because something is obviously wrong. Steve is clawing through his backpack urgently and coughing so hard it sounds like he's choking, and Bucky really cannot stand that sound, but he needs to take out his earbuds so he can ask if Steve is okay, but he really doesn't want to hear him coughing, and then... he remembers that Steve signs. He turns his music up a notch, wishes he was wearing earplugs instead because now it's unpleasantly loud, and kneels down in front of Steve. _"You OK?"_

_"Can't find my inhaler,"_ Steve manages with a few shaky signs, and oh, fuck, that makes sense, he's having some kind of asthma attack. Bucky takes Steve's backpack from him and yanks the zipper all the way open as Steve slumps against the wall, still coughing into the crook of his arm. It only takes Bucky a few seconds to dig through Steve's three folders and two textbooks to find the inhaler. He fumbles it out and thrusts it at Steve, almost dropping it, damn his shitty gross motor skills, and he prays that Steve will take it and do it himself because he has no idea how to operate one of these things.

Luckily, Steve takes it from him and takes a puff in a well-practiced movement. He holds his breath for a moment before letting it out on a long, labored exhale. He's still breathing too fast and shallowly, and when Bucky clicks his music almost all the way down, he can hear Steve wheezing, but the symptoms recede far faster than Bucky would have expected. He at least doesn't seem like he's actively dying anymore. Steve takes another hit off the inhaler and leans back against the wall, closing his eyes. _"Thanks."_

Jesus. That scared the shit out of him.

Bucky sits in front of him, not sure what he should do now that Steve seems to be okay. Ignoring that this happened and going into the classroom to wait for the professor seems like a bad idea, but he's hard-pressed to think of any alternatives that don't involve him awkwardly sitting here and waiting for Steve to recover. He should probably ask whether Steve is okay and then express some kind of sympathy, but Steve's eyes are closed so Bucky can't sign to him, and Bucky is even less verbal than usual now because of the huge rush of adrenaline that was just unexpectedly dumped into his system, so he can't speak out loud. He thinks about it for a while as Steve rests, and by the time Steve opens his eyes again and pushes himself up to stand against the wall, he's come up with a phrase to say, and he proceeds to say it, completely coherently, surprising even himself with his astounding social skills: _"Want me to walk you home?"_

_"No, thanks. I'm alright now. Just tired."_ Tired is an understatement. Steve looks dead on his feet, pale and leaning heavily against the wall. Bucky wonders how long the attack had been going on before he got here. Steve goes to pick up his backpack, but Bucky beats him to it, slinging it over his shoulder next to his own and glaring Steve down when he reaches to take it from him. Steve just rolls his eyes.

_"You're not feeling well. Your health is more important than being in class. I want to walk you home,"_ Bucky signs, and he knows this is total hypocrisy because _he_ refuses to miss class for his disability even when he should, but still... Steve is different. _"I'll turn in our paper."_

_"But..."_

_"And I'll take notes for you and drop them off later."_ Wait, what is he saying? His notes are typically half doodles of shirtless men, and he has been known to zone out during class for minutes at a time if he's distracted by a noise. Or a bug. Or a song he's imagining. Or dust swirling in a sunbeam. Or thinking about how great toads are. Okay, well, it's too late, he already said it, and he'll just have to do his best to actually pay attention, then rewrite his notes later with less doodling. This is a lot of work for a guy Bucky barely knows. Then again, Steve is the only person Bucky currently knows who's fluent in ASL, and Bucky likes signing way more than text-to-speech or AAC, and right now he kind of feels like he'd do a lot to keep talking to him.

_"This happens all the time,"_ Steve says. _"Sometimes during class. I have asthma. I'm used to it. It gets worse when the weather gets cold. If I left class every time this happened I'd probably fail out."_

_"So don't leave every time. Just this time."_

He eventually convinces Steve to let him walk him home. He decides his insistence was justified when Steve pauses in the middle of the quad on the way back to his dorm to lean against a bench and catch his breath, after walking about fifty meters. They continue chatting as they walk--Steve talks about his other disabilities for a while. To Bucky it seems like he's weirdly open about them. He talks at length about how annoying it is to be Deaf in lecture and trying to work off a combination of lip-reading and watching what the professors write on the board, along with what input he gets through his hearing aids. The hearing aids, he explains, are not particularly helpful, because his audio processing is terrible along with his hearing being crap. He also mentions that he had difficulty in high school with anxiety, depression, and a bad bout of pneumonia that almost set him back a year, but that he's doing better now.

They get back to Steve's dorm, which is cute, decorated in a color scheme of dark reds and blues. The walls are hung with maps of all different parts of the world. Bucky examines them appreciatively. Then, just before Bucky is going to tell Steve to take a nap and get himself back to class, Steve asks, _"What's yours?"_

_"My what?"_

_"You know, whatever it is that makes it hard for you to speak."_

Bucky stares at him. Do people just ask these things nowadays, or is this a Steve-specific phenomenon? He's a deer in headlights as Steve waits for an answer. He fidgets, staring out Steve's window like he can escape through it using the sheer power of his mind, but Steve doesn't seem to get the hint; he doesn't change the subject or retract his question.

_"I..."_ Bucky starts, and he says it a few more times, but no more words are coming. Eventually he just signs, _"No."_

_"Oh, I'm sorry, that's fine, I didn't mean to--"_

_"I'm leaving now,"_ Bucky says, completely flustered and off-balance. He manages to remember the script for this situation: _"Feel better."_ The last time Bruce was sick, Bucky told him "Don't die" instead, which didn't go over quite as well, so that's a small win, but the way he shuts Steve's door harder than he meant to, with a bang even Steve could probably hear (damn his shitty gross motor skills, again) and hurries down the hallway, humming anxiously to himself, to escape that uncomfortable situation is definitely _not_ a win at all.

* * *

 

So that's how Bucky finds himself in Bruce's room that night, when really he should be in his _own_ room doing his Real Analysis homework. Bruce is Bucky's social lodestone. Bucky goes to him whenever he needs interpersonal advice. Bruce keeps telling him that he has no qualifications that make him any more able to figure out other people than Bucky is, but he's neurotypical, which would be enough to make him more qualified than Bucky all on its own, and additionally, he's studying psychology. Granted, he's only a sophomore, but Bucky has never taken a single psychology class because he's too afraid of the way the other students would probably look at him, like he's a curiosity. So, basically, Bucky treats Bruce as a walking encyclopedia of Social Rules Nobody Ever Taught Him, and in return, Bucky has taught Bruce a bunch of the tactics he's learned that help him calm down when he's anxious or in sensory overload, to help Bruce with his anger issues. And Bucky listens whenever Bruce wants to talk about the abuse and bullying he went through in high school, _and_ he lets Bruce spend Bucky's dining points whenever he asks.

He comes in to Bruce's room with his text-to-speech app already up on his tablet. Bruce takes one look at him and tells him to get straight to what's wrong. He's sitting at his desk and clearly was working on some kind of psychology-related slide deck, but he closes his laptop and pays Bucky his full attention as soon as he comes in, which Bucky appreciates. Over the course of their friendship, Bruce has learned astonishingly quickly how to relate to Bucky without overwhelming him. For example, he'll make eye contact with Bucky, but without facing his whole body towards him, and sometimes he'll get out a piece of paper and doodle while Bucky talks, which makes Bucky less self-conscious about the time it takes him to type out his responses.

First things first, though--Bucky goes over and sets a cup down on Bruce's desk.

"What's this?"

Bucky taps the side of the cup where the order is written. It's Bruce's usual. Bucky's memory for details about people is terrible, so he has notes on his phone where he keeps track of information about them, including Bruce's favorite coffee order: decaf mocha, no whip. Bruce thanks him, so apparently the coffee was a good move. One point for Bucky. Unfortunately that might be the only point he's scored today.

No, that's not true. He went to all his classes and stayed in the actual classroom almost the whole time, and he took better than usual notes in geology with Steve in mind, with only about half the amount of shirtless man doodles as usual.

He already has a whole paragraph about the Steve situation written up, so he sits down at Bruce's roommate's desk (the roommate is AWOL, as per usual) and pastes it straight into the text-to-speech app and hits the button that makes it start. The voice (his voice, kinda--Tony designed it for him, actually; it's a gravelly voice that Tony swore was "insanely sexy") reads out an explanation of how he and Steve were working on a project together, but Bucky was having a hard time of it on the first day they met to work on it because someone in the class he had right before their meeting had been chewing gum behind him _directly in his ear_ , and then halfway through said class, the professor had put on a video and forgotten to turn the volume down, so it was at volume 100 for about a second before she could turn it off, and Bucky almost died of a heart attack at that very moment.

So then after class he had to go to a bathroom stall and stim to calm down for a while before he could keep it together enough to get to the library without crying (at this Bruce says "Bucky..." in a warning tone because he knows the only reason Bucky stims in a bathroom stall is when he's hurting himself, and he's right, Bucky had hit one of his forearms with the heel of his other hand until it had bruised, but that's not really the point). By the time he got to the library, he was still feeling shaky, and his mind was all over the place, but it wasn't like he could cancel on Steve, so he went and did the meeting. He hadn't wanted to bother with text-to-speech or AAC and had planned to write Steve notes on paper, but he kept forgetting to actually get a piece of paper and pencil out, because the library was so chaotic, and there had been a ticking analog clock on the wall right by their heads, which... who _does_ that? This is the 21st century; analog clocks shouldn't even _exist_ anymore.

At any rate, he explains, the meeting was basically an unmitigated disaster. But their second meting was much better, and it turned out Steve was Deaf and knew sign, which improved things immeasurably. They were also in a much more sensory-friendly location, so Bucky could actually look at Steve enough to discover that he was cute. (No, he didn't type that part out to say it to Bruce.) So now he actually wants to be friends with Steve, and they had talked this morning, but Bucky had been unintentionally rude to him when Steve had asked why he doesn't talk. Clearly Steve is just fine with _his_ disabilities because he was talking all about them on the way back to his dorm, but Bucky... isn't that open about his. Well, he hadn't thought he was trying to hide it, but when he was faced with coming right out and saying it, he...panicked and ran away.

"You're kind of a disaster," Bruce says when Bucky finally finishes talking.

Bucky spreads his hands like _I know_.

"I think you already know what I'm going to suggest," Bruce says gently.

Bucky tilts his chair back, grimaces, and makes a long, whiny noise.

"You have to communicate, Bucky. He probably thinks he offended you."

Bucky wakes his tablet back up. "He offended _me?_ "

"Well, yeah, by asking about your disability." Bruce backtracks, seeing Bucky's confusion. "Most people consider disability to be a private topic. My guess is that Steve wasn't thinking when he asked you about it. Maybe he assumed you're also Deaf, and thought he was just confirming it. But if your reaction was really as bad as you think it is--which it probably wasn't, since you usually don't emote much--then he probably thought he made you so uncomfortable you felt like you had to leave."

"It wasn't like that. I wasn't uncomfortable. I just didn't know what to say and I needed to get back to class and I panicked."

"Then _tell_ him that."

Bucky rolls his eyes and demonstratively tosses the tablet down on the desk. But not hard enough to risk breaking it. He really needs that thing. He curls his hands into fists and taps them against his thighs. He doesn't like even thinking about trying to explain all this to Steve without any context about, well, the way he is.

"Maybe you can text him or something, instead of telling him in person. Do you have his number?"

He picks the tablet back up--so much for that grand gesture--and says, "No, but I have to bring him the notes from geology later, so I'll see him in person."

"Just tell him then. You know you don't actually have to tell him _why_ you don't talk, right?"

"How am I supposed to talk to him about it without telling him?"

"Say you're sensitive about it and you only explain to close friends. He won't be offended."

He hums. He hadn't considered that. "Thanks, Bruce. You're the best. You're a lifesaver."

"No problem. Now can I tell you about the utter bullcrap the psych students were saying about bipolar disorder today?"

Bucky listens, and Bruce is right--it is utter crap.

* * *

 

When Bucky goes to drop off the notes for Steve, Steve isn't actually home. This stymies Bucky for a while, and he spends about five minutes standing in the hallway, staring at the geology notes he rewrote for him, mumbling to himself and attracting stares from everyone else who lives on Steve's floor. Eventually, he gets the brilliant idea to take a thumbtack from Steve's corkboard, leaving his name-card hanging by one corner, and pin the notes to the corkboard where Steve will see them when he gets back to his dorm. After admiring his handiwork for a moment, he also decides to write Steve a note at the top of the page that reads, "These are the notes from geology yesterday. From, Bucky". The notes themselves are probably self-explanatory, but Bucky's an overexplainer.

This, however, means Bucky doesn't get a chance to talk to Steve about his abrupt departure the previous day, as had been his plan. He's still ruminating on that when he's in the cafeteria the next day, sitting at his favorite tiny circular table by the big window, eating stir-fry and reading his Real Analysis text. He jots down the occasional note in the margin, the sounds around him pleasantly muffled through earplugs. Which is when someone sets a plate down on his table.

He looks up. It's Steve. Bucky isn't sure what to do or say, whether the setting-down of the plate is an implicit request to sit, whether he should say hello, or wait for Steve to talk first, and so on, and so forth. Steve sets his water glass down too, but it turns out he's putting his stuff down so he can sign, _"Thanks for the geology notes. You're a lifesaver. May I sit?"_

Bucky hesitates. It's not that he doesn't like Steve, but he had pictured finishing his Real Analysis reading over lunch, so he'll need to mentally shift gears if Steve sits here, which is hard and sometimes puts him in a bad mood. That said, Steve seems worth the gear-shift. So he says yes. Steve leaves to get more food, which gives Bucky a moment to get out his notebook, cross out "real analysis hw" on his schedule over his lunch hour, and pencil it in for his formerly-free 1400-1500 hour, which rectifies the schedule neatly. He tucks the notebook away just as Steve returns to the table.

_"Were you working on something?"_ Steve asks.

_"No. Well, yes, I was doing the reading for Real Analysis."_

_"Which is?"_

Bucky considers how to explain it. _"Did you take calculus?"_

_"I got that far in high school. I missed a ton of school back then, but I had one or two teachers each year who cared enough to make accommodations so I could actually keep up in class. Most of my math teachers were good about it, so I did better in those classes."_

Bucky nods. _"Okay, then you know how calculus is all about infinite sums?"_

Steve makes an adorable, squinty, I-should-probably-remember-that-but-I-don't face, so Bucky describes integration to him using quadrature, sketching on an empty page in his notepad, and he shows the quadrature rectangles getting thinner and thinner until there are infinitely many, infinitely small rectangles, and Steve finally lights up. _"Yes! I remember that!"_

_"Real analysis proves that actually works,"_ Bucky finishes.

Steve's eyes go big. Bucky is charmed by the attention he's paying to math topics he can't possibly care about besides Bucky's interest in them. He's suspicious that Steve is just humoring him, sure, but it's nice to be humored rather than made fun of directly. Then Steve asks, _"How?"_ and Bucky is drawn into a detailed explanation of sequences, real numbers, the Axiom of Completeness, and about eight other theorems, because Steve keeps asking questions, and he actually seems to be getting it and making connections, and moreover it seems like Steve is _genuinely_ interested in what Bucky has to say, just because Bucky's really into the class, and by the time that discussion is over Bucky is pretty sure Steve is not just humoring him. Or if he is humoring him, he's really damn good at it.

Steve kind of breaks the mood by signing, _"I heard you're really, really good at math."_ Bucky's feelings on _that_ topic are complicated as hell. He knows that, objectively, he's passionate about math, and that motivates him to study hard, and as a result he's become quite good at both computation and proofs. But it scares him when people say he's good at it, because what if he's actually just been lucky this whole time? He also wonders if people overestimate how talented he is because it's a common stereotype that people like him excel in STEM fields, particularly math. When he hears about the math ability of savants, it sounds nothing like the hard work and studying he has to put in to succeed, and that makes him feel like a fraud.

So he deflects. _"I don't know about that."_ Then he's groping for a new topic, and he remembers that he was supposed to talk to Steve about recent events. _"By the way, the other day, I'm sorry I left so abruptly. I wasn't expecting you to... to bring that up."_

_"To bring what up?"_

Oh lord. Steve legitimately doesn't even remember The Incident Bucky has been obsessing about nonstop for the past, like, three days. _"My disability."_

_"Ohhhhh."_ Steve's eyes widen. _"That was my bad. I didn't mean to push..."_

Bucky shakes his head. _"You had just been talking about yours, so it made sense. I didn't mean to be rude; I just didn't know how to respond. Anyway, the reason I don't speak  is--"_

_"Hang on,"_ Steve signs, tapping the table to get Bucky's attention. _"Please don't tell me unless you actually want to. I don't need to know to respect you and be your friend."_

Steve's earnestness makes Bucky smile. _"No, it's okay. I'm not ashamed of it. I'm autistic."_

_"That... makes sense. Not that you fit a stereotype or anything! I just--"_

_"Yeah, I know."_ Bucky rolls his eyes, one corner of his mouth quirking up. Like it or not, he knows people can tell he's different.

_"Thanks for telling me. Thanks for trusting me,"_ Steve says, and Bucky blushes and busies himself with his stir-fry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tiny vocab lesson:
> 
> Neurotypical = short for "neurologically typical", meaning not-autistic (and can also cover not-dyslexic, not-ADHD, etc). The point of having a specialized word for this is basically to have a term other than "normal" to refer to non-autistics, since calling non-autistics normal implies that autistic people are abnormal/defective. (As a side-note, I use autism-first instead of person-first language in this fic because that is generally preferred by the autistic advocacy community, and because I prefer it for myself.)
> 
> Stim/stimming = short for "self-stimulation". This refers to anything an autistic (or ADHD, etc.) person does to give themself comforting or grounding sensory input (for example, to calm down if there's something overwhelming in their environment, or just because it feels good). Common examples are hand-flapping or rocking, but there are a ton of ways that people stim, like squeezing putty, rubbing/squeezing/scratching/hitting body parts, listening to loud music, staring at moving water, repeating words over and over... Most neurotypical people stim sometimes or in some ways, but autistic people usually do it more often, more noticeably/intensely, or differently.
> 
> Faceblind = unable to easily recognize people by their faces. Faceblindness is common in autistic people, who may have to memorize "signs" in order to recognize someone and may not be able to recognize someone who has recently changed their appearance (for example, by cutting their hair or wearing different clothing than usual).
> 
> AAC = augmentative and alternative communication. Many autistic people (and people with other disabilities) have trouble speaking and may instead do something like pointing to pictures on a board, or, more commonly these days, use apps and technology (varying from image-boards to text-to-speech and other variants) to help them communicate. It's common for speech ability to come and go depending on the circumstances, and it varies a lot from person to person how exactly that works.


	3. Chapter 3

"This is so frustrating," Natasha says, uncharacteristically losing her composure and slapping her notes down beside her on Steve's desk, which she's sitting atop. "I should just drop the class."

"Nat, no," Steve says. She asked to come over an hour and a half ago to rehearse for the public speaking class she's taking because she thinks it will help her with making presentations in medical school later on. She's majoring in neurobiology and aims to become a psychiatrist, so she has a lot more school ahead of her. "You're doing fine. Let's run it through one more time, and I'll give you some cues." They're both talking out loud so Steve can hear her tone of voice (sort of) as she practices.

She shakes her head, curling in on herself even more. "I'm serious. In my personal evaluation from our five-minute speeches, the professor said I suck at audience engagement and I constantly sound sarcastic. And she's right."

"You just need to find what you care about in your speech, and focus on that. Then it'll naturally--"

"No, Steve, you don't _get_ it. This is what I'm like naturally. I have a flat affect. I've always been that way, since I was a child."

It's easy to forget just how difficult Natasha's life was when she was young. She's secretive about it, but she let slip to Steve, after knowing him for over a year, that she was raised in an abusive cult until a social worker finally got her out. From what he's gathered, the philosophy was that children should be seen and not heard, but preferably not seen, either. It makes sense that she has difficulty showing emotion during her speech; she was taught not to express herself when she was young. She could explain that to the professor, but she shouldn't be required to air out her dirty laundry just to pass Public Speaking.

Steve changes tacks. "Yeah, you're right. Maybe if you amp up the pathos in your words themselves, and add in some more emotional language, she'll score you higher on engagement even if your nonverbal communication doesn't change."

Natasha looks like she's about to lash out at him for a second, and Steve braces himself, but she visibly restrains herself. "Actually, that's not a bad idea."

"It's stupid that she's grading you on all this stuff you can't control," Steve says, flipping the rubric over. Now that he's thinking about it, almost every aspect of this class would be difficult for someone with even common mental illnesses like anxiety or depression, much less something like Natasha's background. Students are supposed to speak in front of the whole class, knowing that all the students are scoring them on feedback forms as they talk. They're expected to maintain eye contact with the crowd, while also making "appropriate" facial expressions and body language, which is where Natasha got marked down. They also have to modulate the tone of their voice properly, engage their audience with their content, respond to audience feedback _during_ the speech, have a well-structured introduction, body, and conclusion, _and_ establish credibility by citing external sources... The fact that the rubric is printed double-sided says it all, really. "Now that I'm thinking about it, this is ridiculous. What if it was me and I couldn't 'respond to audience feedback' because I couldn't hear the audience? These expectations are way over the top. Everyone's different, and a public speaking class should be a place to celebrate and share those differences with--"

"Ah, so I see Bucky told you," Natasha cuts him off, wearing her best shit-eating grin.

He splutters for a moment. "Th-that's not why--I just think everyone deserves to be treated fairly, and--"

Natasha cuts him off, again, before he can launch into his favorite fairness-versus-equality speech and divert her from the Bucky point. "But I'm right, aren't I."

"Well, yes, but--" _How_ does she always manage to read him so well?

"So you two are getting close?"

Since work time seems to be over, Steve shifts back to signing. _"We've been hanging out."_ He blushes. It's his worst tell. Damn his shitty Irish complexion. _"We go on silent walks together sometimes."_

_"Silent walks?"_

_"Bucky came up with it. He puts in earplugs, I turn my hearing aid off, and we walk the trail in the woods behind the dining hall."_

Natasha arches an eyebrow. _"The long one?"_

_"Yep."_

The eyebrow arches even higher. There are two trails behind the dining hall; one is about a mile long, and the other, the long one, is a three-mile loop that meanders around a stream. Bucky and Steve have walked it a few times together in the past week or two. Steve is fascinated by how Bucky always points out forest creatures, like a toad or a cool bird, that Steve would have walked right by. Bucky looks at ease in the forest, far more relaxed than he ever seems to be around campus. He talks less, but he seems happier. He constantly stops to look at rocks, run his fingers over the bark of trees, and sometimes takes his earplugs out to listen to the wind or the stream. It's kind of adorable to watch.

_"What's that goofy look on your face?"_ Natasha signs coolly, pulling Steve back to the present.

_"Shut up."_

_"You love me."_ Natasha says that like she's as confident as could be imagined, but there's a flash of vulnerability in her eyes.

So he's quick to sign _"I love you"_ back.

* * *

 

The fire alarm skyrockets straight to first place as the absolute worst sensory experience Bucky has had this year when it goes off at two in the morning on Wednesday night.

Bucky thrashes his way out of bed, wearing only his boxers (he can't stand sleeping with a shirt on), and is vaguely upright in the middle of his room before he's even completely conscious. The beeping sound is beyond so-loud-it's-painful and well into the delightful realm of so-loud-he's-going-to-go-into-sensory-overload-and-have-to-skip-class-tomorrow-if-he-stays-in-here-any-longer-than-a-few-minutes, and the timer is already ticking.

He whines to himself in the back of his throat, though he can't hear it over the wailing of the alarm .Is this a drill? Should he get clothes on or is he supposed to rush out in whatever he's wearing? Why didn't he wear a shirt to bed like a normal person? He stumbles over to his closet. It feels like he's moving through water; the sound crushes him like a vise. He manages to yank a t-shirt over his head and pull on sweatpants. Then he's scrambling over to the door. The rational part of his brain is reciting a long list of stuff he's forgetting--earplugs, his favorite stim toy, shoes, his phone, his water bottle, his hoodie... literally _all_ of his comfort objects are still in his dorm.

The entire rest of his brain is a screeching dumpster fire from the sound. He can't get away fast enough. When he gets out into the hall, the fluorescent lights spike into his eyes, and he can feel the alarm buzzing in his teeth; the speaker for the alarm system is _right_ across from teh door to his room.

Head down so he doesn't have to speak to anyone and fingers plugging his ears, he rushes down the hall and bursts out past the RA holding the door open into the parking lot by the dorm.

Into frigid, 40-degree weather. _Fuck._ He hadn't realized it was getting this cold at night already.

He stumbles away from the gathering crowd of disgruntled students who are laughing, socializing, and playing with their phones near the door, putting space between himself and the dorm as fast as possible. It's pitch black outside. The feeling of the rough asphalt under his feet is kind of grounding, but it's also rapidly draining the warmth out of his toes. Even though the sound is much fainter from over here, it's still irritating. He's also completely jacked up with adrenaline from being woken up in the middle of the night by possibly the loudest noise he's ever heard in his life. His ears are ringing, and the pain in his right eye presages a migraine.

Even as he crosses the parking lot, he's starting to shiver from the brisk wind. This isn't going to work. He has no idea how long the fire drill is supposed to last, but his feet are beginning to ache from the cold and he's only been out here like two minutes. He needs to go get his shoes, but to do that, he'd have to walk back _towards_ the sound to ask his RA if he can get them. Even if he can manage that, she won't be able to hear his text-to-speech program, so he'll have to write a note on his phone and show it to her, and he knows with how frazzled he is right now, if she tries to respond verbally, he won't be able to understand her, and it'll just be a huge mess and he can't do this right now, he just can't.

So he finishes crossing to the empty side of the parking lot, sits down on the curb, and curls forward, resting his forehead on his knees. He closes his eyes and tries to pretend he's anywhere else. It's pretty much impossible. The cold is a constant reminder of exactly what's going on right now.

He can't freak out over this. It's a time-limited event. The fire alarm can only go off for so long, he reasons, and then they'll be let back in the dorm.

What will he do if it's _not_ a drill, though? This could take hours. He could literally get frostbite. Also, he's pretty sure he's shutting down, because when it finally occurs to him that he could go into one of the _other_ dorms to get warm, or see if the library's still open, he actually can't get himself to stand up. He can only sit there with his eyes closed and rock. He wishes he was in his room, where he could hide under his desk until the shutdown passed.

Someone is saying words in front of him. He can hear all the sounds, but can't string them together into meaning. He tunes into the real world enough to hear that the alarm is still going off, which means the person in front of him _isn't_ telling him that he can go back inside, and there's nothing else he cares about enough to listen to right now, so he just shakes his head no and hopes that will drive whoever it is off.

Apparently, though, it does not, because a second later a warm hand touches the top of his foot. Something is set down in his field of view--a phone, with the notes app open, and a note written on it. _Are you okay? You kind of look like you're not._

He glances up--even moving his eyes hurts; he _definitely_ has a migraine--and of course, it's Steve, in a big sweatshirt. And shoes. Before Bucky can respond, Steve is stripping of the sweatshirt and pushing it at him. Bucky takes a long time to remember how to reach out and grab the sweatshirt. It feels like he's piloting his body like a mecha from hundreds of meters away. When he figures out how to move his arms, he pushes it back at Steve.

"No, you need it more," Steve says, and pushes it back at him. When Bucky doesn't take it, he drapes it across Bucky's shoulders. He takes the phone back. _Come on. Let's go to one of the other dorms where it's warmer._

Bucky shakes his head again. He can't. He just wants to sit here until the noise stops. He knows his head will hurt worse if he moves.

_I don't want to make you do anything you don't want to do, but seriously, you can't stay out here. The RA said this isn't a drill, so they have to get firemen to clear the building before they let us back inside. It's going to take hours._

Fuck. Bucky whines unhappily. He grabs the phone. _hlp me up_

Steve reads it, then slips an arm under Bucky's arms, and together, they make their way to their feet. Steve has to sort of catch him because Bucky almost collapses when the wave of pain from his migraine hits him, but he manages to stay standing. Although the blinking lights and alarm are still going full force, the rest of the students near the dorm are dissipating. The RA must have just announced that this would take several more hours to clear up.

Bucky has no idea where Steve is taking him, but he lets him lead through the dark and quiet campus. He's stuck inside himself; he'd like to explain to Steve that he's shutting down and he needs to be left alone for a few hours to get his shit together, but the pain from the migraine, combined with how upset he is, are making it impossible for him to communicate. He can't even think clearly enough to sign.

Steve's sweatshirt smells like him, he notes absently. It's nice.

Eventually, Steve swipes them into some other dorm--Bucky doesn't even know which one--and they go inside. The wave of heat is almost painful. Bucky curls and uncurls his toes, which are prickling as they start to regain sensation. He covers his eyes with one hand against the light. It hurts so badly it's making him vaguely nauseous.

Steve guides them both slowly down the hall and stops in front of one of the doors. He sets Bucky against the wall and frowns as Bucky squints at him through his one functional eye. _"Does your head hurt?"_

Bucky nods.

_"We'll get you something for it. Hang on."_

Steve gets out his phone again and makes a call. Bucky hears a phone ringing from inside the dorm room. Then, someone who sounds quite disgruntled picks up. Bucky slides down the wall to crouch on the floor. He considers just curling up and going to sleep in the hallway.

Steve says a few words into the phone, and the door opens. He talks quietly with the dorm's occupant for a minute, then taps Bucky's shoulder and signals for him to get up. _"Can you sign?"_ Steve asks once Bucky is standing.

Bucky manages _"Yes."_

_"This is Sam,"_ Steve continues, signing slowly and clearly, which helps Bucky track his hands. It's hard because it hurts to _see,_ and everything kind of looks like it's sparkling. _"He's a friend. We can sleep on his floor tonight."_

Bucky, ungratefully, fucking hates that suggestion, because he was _supposed_ to sleep in his _own_ bed tonight, not on a stranger's floor at the ass-crack of nothing in the morning. Steve is explaining things to Sam; it's all going in one ear and out the other for Bucky. He ushers Bucky into the dark room, which immediately lessens his migraine. Sam tosses some extra blankets down from his bed onto the throw rug.

Resigning himself to this terrible situation, Bucky sinks to his knees, then curls up on his side, pressing his cheek into the carpet. Despite himself, he's already drifting off. The deep pressure of lying directly on the floor is calming. Steve shuffles around, speaking quietly to Sam. There's the rattling of a pill bottle, and then Steve nudges Bucky awake, holding out two Ibuprofen and a cup of water. Bucky takes them, and Steve slips a pillow under him as he lies down again. He's out almost immediately.

* * *

 

Bucky bolts upright beside Steve when Steve's phone alarm goes off at seven in the morning, which does more to wake Steve up than the alarm did. He usually relies on his phone's vibrations to wake him up, but they aren't carrying through the floor very well. He shuts off the alarm, then stares blearily at Bucky for a moment. They're lying in a nest of blankets on the floor of Sam's dorm, and their feet are tangled together. Steve pulls away, blushing, but Bucky doesn't respond. He ended up wearing Steve's sweatshirt, and he's still wearing it. It's a little small on him; his wrists stick out.

It takes Steve a moment to remember the events of last night and why he feels so groggy and disoriented. Sam is still soundly asleep on his bed, snoring softly.

He pushes himself up on one elbow as Bucky, frowning, gets to his feet and claws his fingers through his tangled hair. _"Shit, what time is it? I need to get to class. I was supposed to do homework this morning."_ He's much more animated than he was last night.

_"Seven,"_ Steve signs. _"Are you feeling any better?"_

Bucky nods vigorously. _"Yeah, it was just..."_ He looks away. _"Sensory overload. It gives me migraines. It's gone now, though. Sleeping it off usually works. Thanks for your help last night."_

_"No problem. You're sure you're okay to go to class?"_

_"Yes, fine. I really need to go, though. Will you tell..."_

_"Sam,"_ Steve supplies.

_"Right, Sam. Tell him thanks for me, okay?"_

_"Sure."_ Bucky smiles, pausing to fold up the blankets he was sleeping on and put them in a neat pile on top of his pillow before he slips out the door.

When Steve turns back, Sam is propped up on one elbow, rubbing his eyes. "Well, _he's_ cute."

"Sam..."

"Aw, come _on_ , I finally get to meet tall-dark-and-handsome and you expect me not to comment?"

"Yes!" Steve yelps. He shades his eyes so he can see Sam's face better in the light, but Sam sits up so he can read his lips more easily.

"Well, count me intrigued. I get the feeling I didn't see him at his best, though."

"No, he's usually a little more charming than that." He had told Sam last night that he had found Bucky completely out of it in the parking lot, not even wearing shoes, let alone a jacket, curled up on the curb like he was resigned to just dying there. Normally Steve would have crashed in one of the other dorm lounges on a couch, but he didn't think he could take Bucky in that state to a public place and expect him to relax at all. "He has his problems, but I guess you have experience with that," he says, gesturing to himself.

"Do I ever," Sam snarks. He pulls himself to his feet. "God, I need coffee."

"Sorry."

"No, it's no problem, man. Door's always open." He grabs a thing of instant coffee from one of his desk drawers and flicks an electric kettle on. He brandishes the coffee at Steve. "You want any?"

"Sure, thanks." Steve gets up to sit on the edge of Sam's bed, dragging one of the blankets with him.

"What were you saying when he left?"

"Oh, he was saying he needed to get to class, and he told me to thank you for letting us stay here last night. He was pretty freaked out. We were both relieved to have somewhere to go."

Sam pours two cups of shitty instant coffee, adds cream and sugar to both, and hands one to Steve. He won't let Steve take it black even when he requests it that way because he says instant coffee is just self-flagellation unless it's sweetened. "So are you thinking about asking him out?"

_"Sam!"_ Steve admonishes. "It's not like that! We're just friends!"

"Well, you could have fooled me, sleeping spooning each other and shit."

"We were not _spooning!_ "

"You totally were. He was the big spoon."

"Sam I swear to god if you say one more word--"

"There was a spark, Steve. There was _chemistry._ "

"There was not a spark," Steve insists, but he's blushing, damn his shitty Irish complexion, which means as far as Sam is concerned he has admitted defeat. He groans, rolls his eyes, and starts picking up blankets off the ground.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun fact: I did actually once in real life leave my dorm at like 2 am in winter during a fire drill with no pants on. just grabbed a towel and ran. it was not my finest moment
> 
> Flat affect = the state of not having visible facial expressions, or seeming emotionally "flat"/emotionless. Doesn't necessarily mean not *having* any emotions, though.
> 
> Shutting down/shutdown = a state of reduced responsiveness that some autistic people enter in response to sensory overload or being overwhelmed for other reasons. A person who is shut down may have trouble moving, speaking, or paying attention to the outside world.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a short one, I might post again later tonight to make up for it though :)
> 
> yes captain america movies are a thing in this au, no it doesn't make any sense, fight me I couldn't help myself

_"Hey, Nat,"_ Steve signs, approaching her table in the cafeteria for their usual Thursday lunch date. Then he catches sight of hte guy sitting next to her, chatting animatedly. He does a double-take. It's nobody he knows, a short, scruffy, round-faced guy with light-brown hair that sticks up in every possible direction. He's kind of... ugly-cute. _"Who's this?"_ Steve signs. He supposes it's a little rude not to include the stranger in the conversation, but he hates trying to converse verbally in the loud, crowded dining hall.

That turns out not to be a problem. _"I'm Clint."_ He fingerspells his name, then shows Steve his sign name. _"Natasha and I have neurobiology together."_

_"I'm Steve. Nice to meet you,"_ Steve says, his automatic politeness kicking in. _"Are you Deaf?"_

Clint tilts his head and touches his hearing aid in response.

_"Cool. Did Nat tell you I was gonna sit here?"_

_"Of course I told him. Don't be an idiot,"_ Natasha says. She pats the seat next to her, and Steve sits down, but he gives her a significant look that hopefully says _You're going to explain this later._ Natasha plays her cards close to her vest; Steve knows he's one of her only friends, and he's not sure she's _ever_ brought someone else to their Thursday lunch date before. He gets a good vibe from Clint though. He doesn't seem creepy--he's not sitting super close to her or anything, and they were definitely conversing about something when Steve came in.

_"You look tired,"_ Nat says, pointedly ignoring The Look. _"Late night?"_

Steve rolls his eyes. _"Yeah, there was a fire alarm last night at two in the morning because someone burned popcorn so badly they set off the actual fire alarm, and they had to call a firetruck and everything, so nobody could get back into the dorm for hours. Bucky and I had to leave and sleep elsewhere."_

Natasha wiggles her eyebrows intensely. _"Sleeping with him already?"_

_"Fuck you. Sam literally just teased me about it for thirty minutes straight this morning."_

_"Fine, fine, I'll let you off the hook this time."_

Clint laughs. He must be fairly fluent in sign if he's following the conversation; Steve isn't slowing down for him at all. _"Is Bucky his boyfriend?"_ he asks.

_"No,"_ Steve signs.

_"Yes,"_ Natasha signs simultaneously, with great emphasis.

_"He's really not."_

_"He wants him to be."_

Steve rolls his eyes and gets up to get food as Natasha starts describing Bucky to Clint to see if he knows him.

* * *

He's surprised when that's not the last he sees of Clint. During the next week, Clint joins Steve and Natasha for food several more times and starts saying hi to Steve when he sees him around campus. Later in the week, Steve gets a text from an unknown number that turns out to be Clint, who got Steve's number from Nat, asking if Steve wants to watch a movie with them in Clint's dorm on Friday. The suggested hour is reasonable, and Clint throws in "With captions, of course," so Steve is pretty much sold. Before he can respond, a second text follows, adding that Natasha has already invited Bucky on the pretext that Steve would be there, so Steve pretty much is obligated to come to make an honest man out of Clint. Steve texts back, "I would have agreed even without the threat."

"A little threatening never hurt anyone," Clint replies. Steve likes the guy more and more every day.

The setup in Clint's room is awesome. His roommate is staying with his boyfriend for the night, Clint explains, so they have the entire room to themselves. There's a stretch of floor framed by the two beds that faces a humongous flatscreen TV, and Clint has dragged what looks like five or six person's worth of bedding onto the floor between them, like a blanket fort with no roof. A blanket courtyard, if you will.

Natasha and Clint are reclined on pillows, close together but not touching, in one corner of the fort, and Bucky is curled up on the other side, leaving Steve a space between Nat and Bucky. He looks nervous, but smiles when he sees Steve enter.

"Finally, we can start," Clint grouses jokingly. "We almost finished the popcorn already." He holds up a half-empty bag that he and Natasha are sharing.

"I'm on time!" Steve protests, settling in between Natasha and Bucky.

Bucky scoots a little closer to him, pulling a blue quilt over his legs. As Clint gets up to hook the movie from his laptop up to the TV and adjust the volume, Bucky pulls out his phone and writes, _Good day today?_

_"Can I sign?"_ Steve checks. Bucky has explained to him that his receptive and expressive communication abilities aren't always correlated--when he's overwhelmed, he prefers typing to signing, but he can usually still understand signed and spoken language. Bucky signals for him to go on. _"It was alright. I have an essay for Professor Nicholson due Monday."_

Bucky's eyes widen. _I've heard about him. He grades on grammar,_ Bucky types. This is true: Nicholson will knock essay grades down to a zero for having more than three spelling or grammar errors, despite the fact that he's supposedly teaching politics, not English. It's a clearly discriminatory policy that's a huge problem for international students and students with learning disabilities. Nicholson is a punitive grader in general, and the best most students can hope for in his classes is a solid C. Steve is holding onto a B in his course on nonviolence, but just barely.

_"Yeah, I know. I've been to the Writing Center three times, and I'm going again on Monday morning."_

_You'll do fine,_ Bucky types. _You're a hard worker._

_"You don't know that. Maybe I only work hard in geology."_

_No, I can tell._

"Alright, here we go," Clint says finally. The title screen for one of the Captain American films rolls. The four of them have almost nothing in common--there's Natasha, who was raised in a cult, Clint, a hearing-impaired guy who claims he grew up in a circus (the jury's still out on whether Steve believes that or not, but he sure seems sincere), Steve, a Deaf, asthmatic social justice warrior, and Bucky, an autistic math prodigy--but, when they spent three days arguing about what to watch, they found out that they do share one important thing: a love for superhero movies.

Bucky fidgets through the first scene before sheepishly requesting that Clint turn the volume down a little, after making sure Natasha would still be able to hear everything if it was quieter. Bucky has an audio processing disorder, so, like Steve, he probably doesn't get much out of the audio track besides the big explosions.

It takes a few more adjustments to get the audio tuned so everyone can enjoy it. Clint patiently goes back and forth from the laptop to the blanket fort until it's finally perfect. The bass is cranked up so Steve and Clint can feel it, but the overall sound is turned down enough not to overwhelm Bucky, and Natasha just has to deal with their weird settings. She swears she doesn't mind, though.

Bucky finally relaxes, uncurling to stretch his feet out and settling back into the pile of pillows. (Steve eventually realizes there are several beanbag chairs buried under all the blankets and pillows, which explains how Clint got the pile so deep.) He's close to Steve, so close Steve can feel the heat of his body, and their lower legs are brushing together.

All of them have seen the movie before, so they keep up a back-channel of signed conversation about it. Steve, as per usual, keeps up a running list of which characters are and aren't hot and/or gay, and rates the outfits of the male characters in detail every time someone shows up wearing a new one. Bucky's eyes widen at the first few comments he makes--maybe Steve had forgotten to mention to him that he's bi? It hadn't really come up--but participates enthusiastically after that, disagreeing completely with Steve on nearly every single one of his outfit ratings.

Bucky also keeps moving closer to Steve. At first it's little shifts that seem like coincidence. Bucky resettles himself on the beanbag and then their shoulders are touching, and he makes no effort to move away. A few minutes later Steve finds that their legs are pressed together. He glances at Bucky, who is watching the movie intently. He's lying on his side half-facing Steve and meets his eyes with a questioning look, but Steve just signs, _"It's nothing,"_ , and Bucky goes back to watching the movie.

A few minutes later, Bucky simply shifts forward and rests his head on Steve's shoulder, draping himself down Steve's side.

At first Steve is tense. It's not that he's not enjoying this--Bucky is warm, his hair is soft, and, okay, Steve is about ready to admit he _might_ have a _tiny_ crush on him--but he's terrified that if he does something wrong, Bucky will move. He tries not to even breathe too forcibly, wanting the moment of closeness to last forever.

But he has the movie as a distraction, and he tries his best to at least appear to be watching it, which isn't that hard because if he looks away from the screen he misses all the dialog--it's completely incomprehensible when filtered through both the speakers and his hearing aid. Soon he's able to un-tense a little bit, because Bucky doesn't seem to be going anywhere--he's even looped his hand around Steve's upper arm, where his head is pillowed.

As the credits roll, and Clint and Natasha (who were curled up together for the whole movie, not that Steve was paying much attention to anything besides Bucky) are getting up to clean up the popcorn scattered all over their side of the blanket nest, Steve nudges Bucky to get his attention. But he's a total dead weight on Steve's shoulder, which is how Steve realizes he's asleep.

_"Aw, that's adorable,"_ Nat signs, and for once, Steve doesn't snap at her, just smiles a goofy smile that he'll probably be hearing about for the next month.

_"I'll wake him in a minute,"_ Steve assures Clint, who shrugs and says he doesn't care as the two of them leave the room, ostensibly to shake the popcorn out of the worst-affected blanket outside.

Once they've left, Steve just... stares at Bucky, for a minute that seems to stretch out forever. He can feel Bucky's breath lightly on his chest. Bucky has gone totally boneless against Steve, and the trust it shows that Bucky was able to fall asleep curled against him takes Steve's breath away. Right now, resting his head on Steve's chest with his leg hooked over Steve's, sleeping peacefully, he looks a far cry from the hard-shelled, standoffish student, constantly retreating into daydreams, that Steve first met in geology class.Even after Bucky realized Steve signed, it took a long time for him to open up about anything more than the most superficial aspects of his life. He only told Steve about himself in reciprocity after Steve had opened up to him first, like when Steve told him he was Deaf and asthmatic, prompting Bucky to (eventually) reveal that he's autistic.

But Bucky volunteers information about himself sometimes, now. It seems hard for him, and often it takes him a long time to articulate even a sentence about something that upset him or something he's excited about in the future, but he makes the effort for Steve.

It makes Steve feel special. He's never thought of himself as someone worth making an effort for. Sure, he tries his best to be a kind person, a good listener, someone people would want to hang out with. But his Deafness is a barrier that many people aren't willing to cross. People don't want to hang out with a tiny, nerdy, multiply-disabled kid who actually cares about his Peace and Conflict Studies degree.

Well, most people. But then he met Natasha, then Sam, and now there's Bucky and maybe even Clint in his circle. Steve spent his first semester of college heart-wrenchingly lonely, only occasionally hanging out with Nat when she'd push him to come out of his dorm and get dinner with her. Now he's constantly surrounded by friends: people he can rely on, and who can rely on him; people he loves, and who love him in return.

His whole life, he has wanted to be as independent as possible given his disabilities. But lately he's started wondering if independence is all it's cracked up to be.

Shaking himself out of his thoughts, he nudges Bucky a little harder. "Hey, Buck," he murmurs.

Bucky finally stirs, inhaling sharply. He stretches, going taut against Steve, and tilts his head up to look at him. _"Time?"_

_"It's nine. The movie just ended."_

Bucky sits up, pulling away from Steve, who is instantly cold when Bucky's heat is gone. _"Liar!"_  he teases,  _"The credits already finished. And where are Nat and Clint?"_

_"Okay, it ended like five minutes ago. I didn't want to wake you. Nat and Clint are--"_

Conveniently, the door opens and Natasha and Clint return with the de-popcorned blanket, and Clint says he needs to be getting to bed, so everyone says their goodbyes and Steve can go home and brood in peace.


	5. Chapter 5

After movie night, Steve starts noticing how tactile Bucky has become as they've gotten close. When they're hanging out doing homework together, Bucky will sit so close to Steve their shoulders are almost touching, and he'll lean into him to point out an error in one of Steve's diagrams or density calculations for geology. Occasionally, the two hang out in the library, and sometimes, when they're sitting on opposite sides of one of the grimy library couches, Bucky will turn and lay his head in Steve's lap, holding a book over his face to read. Steve asks him if that position can possibly be comfortable--to fit, he has to hook his legs over the arm, which has almost no padding on it--but Bucky just scoffs and signs _"Of course it's comfortable,"_ which leads to an explanation of how he likes deep pressure and feels more comfortable when there's something firm pressing into him, like the arm of the couch, or the weight of another person.

Steve supposes that explains it: it's a sensory thing. Bucky likes the tactile input another person can provide. It's not oblique flirting, like Steve had hoped.

At first he's a little bit disappointed. He had hoped there could be something there. Bucky is really, really attractive, particularly when he's not spending all his time scowling and trying not to talk to people because he's afraid they won't understand him. He and Steve get along famously. If they _were_ to take their relationship to the next level, Steve is pretty sure it would be easy and natural.

But if that's not what Bucky wants, he'll just have to adjust his expectations. Steve values Bucky's friendship far too much to throw it away over a crush. He's not going to do anything stupid or impulsive, like confess his feelings, or kiss him. Even when it's incredibly tempting.

Definitely not.

* * *

"Come on, it'll be fun," Natasha says, perfecting her mascara in the mirror. "We're just going for a few hours."

_"I'll be a third wheel,"_ Steve signs. _"You guys go. Have fun. I'm not interested."_

"Steve, seriously. Go get that leather jacket from your closet--yes I know about that--and some skinny jeans and come with us. I'll do your makeup if you want."

_"No. I won't have fun."_

"Yes you will. You can get drunk; I'll make you something to bring. I promise you won't be a third wheel."

Steve groans. _"You're not going to leave me alone once we're there, are you?"_

"Not planning on it. Think of it as my way of making up for teasing you earlier."

_"You could just apologize!"_

"What would be the fun in that?"

This is not the first time Natasha has tried to drag him to one of the house parties she sometimes goes to, although Clint is actually the instigator this time--apparently he asked Nat if she, and any of her friends, wanted to come. He knows the guys who are hosting, and according to him, it'll be a relaxed scene. Loud music, low lighting, dancing, and drinking, but nobody disrespectful or belligerent will be invited. Still, parties aren't really Steve's thing. The noise level makes it impossible to hear, and in the dark, it's hard to read lips, too. Nat generally translates for him, and she's good at it, but he feels bad making her do it. In the past when he's caved and gone with her, he usually has left early, feeling weird and left out.

Still, if it'll make Nat happy... _"Fine. I'll go. I'm not going to stay out late, though, okay?"_

Nat squeals and hugs him. _"We're going to have a great time. Okay, go get your clothes! Clint'll be here in ten minutes! Run!"_

* * *

An hour later, they're already half-sauced, leaning on each other with Steve's arm around Nat's shoulders as they walk up to the house. Steve is in conniptions over some stupid comment Nat made, laughing so hard he can barely walk, and although the house is still half a block away, he's beginning to pick up on the sound of the pounding music through his hearing aid.

They somehow make it to the house and open the door into a living room packed with people dancing; music is pulsing through what looks like a surprisingly fancy speaker system, though it's not like Steve can make out anything other than the heavy beat. Nat takes his hand and leads him through the mass of people, shouldering between them, following Clint into the kitchen.

Clint's hearing must be a little better than Steve's, because when they get to the kitchen Nat leans into to talk to him, and he's nodding and seems to be following, and giving her an utterly dopey smile. It hits Steve, suddenly, that there's some serious flirting going on here. He falters. There's a steady stream of people filtering in and out of the room, but nobody he knows, so he pushes awkwardly up against a counter as he waits for Nat to be done talking to Clint, and because he has nothing else to do, he gets his water bottle of incredibly sweet alcoholic sludge that Nat made for him out of his bag and starts drinking again.

He must lose track of time, because suddenly Nat and Clint are right up in his face. They sign simultaneously, which is hard to follow, but they're both saying the word "dance". Steve actually enjoys dancing, and he thinks maybe this _will_ be fun after all, because the speakers are powerful enough to actually bring him some of the bass, so he follows them back into the living room. For a while things are great. Steve dances with Nat as Clint works his way around the room, and then for a while he's dancing with some random guy who keeps trying to talk to him even though Steve is shaking his head and smiling and pointing at is ears and shrugging and generally trying his damndest to communicate he can't hear shit, and then Nat gets Steve back again, and Clint even dances with him briefly, then returns to jumping around completely off-beat but clearly having a fantastic time--he has, somewhere along the way, lost his shirt _and_ kissed several different people, none of whom he seemed to actually know--and then, all of a sudden, like a bucket of cold water to the face, Steve turns around to find Nat and Clint making out.

Passionately.

Like Steve isn't even there.

It's not like he cares if they get together or not, but... well, for one thing, it's absolutely disgusting to watch. Secondly, these are the only two people capable of actually talking to Steve at this party. They appear to be seriously occupied, and as the moments tick by, it becomes clear they won't be un-occupied anytime soon.

Well, fuck.

He continues dancing half-heartedly through another two songs, waiting to see if they'll disengage, but he's not really having fun anymore, and when he sees that the two of them are somehow _still_ making out (seriously, shouldn't they have suffocated to death by now?) he slinks off to the back of the house. Nat doesn't even notice, which stings, especially since she _promised_ not to abandon him.

Once he gets away from the living room he realizes he's drunker than he thought. He has to lean on a wall to get to the back of the house. Everything is spinning, and what little he can hear sounds even more distorted tan usual. He makes his way to the bathroom, where he leans on the sink and tries to regroup, but he doesn't know what to do. He should probably go home, but he's not sure he's sober enough to actually get back to his dorm in one piece. Well, he'd probably make it, but he knows that as soon as he leaves the warm house and is out in the cold night air all alone knowing Nat and Clint are still inside having a good time (way too good of a time, in his opinion), he's going to be _really_ sad.

He splashes some cold water on his face, but, unsurprisingly, finds himself just as drunk as he was before he did that.

A minute later he finds himself with his phone out in his hand, and the messaging app opened. Did he put in his lock code? What even _is_ his lock code? Also, does he have _any_ inhibitions right now at all? He doesn't think so, which probably means texting is a bad idea, but fuck it. He's already written "Bucky" in the "To:" field, apparently, so he types out a short message that says something sort of like "I'm way too drunk and Natasha left me alone at a party, can you come walk me home?" He wavers with his thumb over the send button; he's sober enough to see that there are about eighteen bajillion spelling errors in what he just typed, but not sober enough to correct them.

He sends the message. Fuck, that was stupid. Bucky is probably asleep right now. Whenever now is. He doesn't bother to check; he's already set his phone face down on the sink, and now he's lost in daydreams about Bucky, and how much he likes him, and really, really enjoys being friends with him, so much, and how his heart does a little backflip every time he sees him. He's thinking about that one time on one of their walks in the woods that Bucky accidentally walked through a thorn bush and got thorns caught in his sweatshirt, and Steve stopped him and had Bucky hold his arms out while he picked them out one by one, and how while he was doing that Bucky was so close Steve could smell the rich, masculine scent of his sweat under his deodorant, and--

Someone bangs on the bathroom door and yells something. Okay, Steve has totally lost track of time. "Sorry," he says, probably slurring, though he can't hear himself well enough to tell, and he opens the door, letting a nauseated-looking drunk person through. He slips back out into the hallway before realizing that he left his phone in the bathroom. But the door is closed now, and he can't very well try to get back in, so instead he turns and makes his way to the front of the house. It's _packed_ in here now, and Steve is not very tall, so he's forced to shove sweaty, drunk people out of his way, and he can't see two feet in front of him, so he's not even sure whether Natasha is still here or not. Maybe she and Clint are screwing in a back room. Okay, that's gross; he doesn't need to think about that. Anyway, if so, he's happy for her. Really. He is.

He just... wishes she hadn't dragged him to this stupid party if she just wanted to hang out with Clint.

He makes it to the front porch, which is wreathed in the pungent and fresh smell of weed smoke. He's vaguely aware of people leaning up against the porch rail, and even recognizes one of them from geology class, one of the actual geo majors, but he can't bring himself to say hi. He sits down heavily on the bottom step and props his head in his hands. Maybe if he sits out here for a few minutes, he'll sober up enough to walk himself back to campus without getting hit by a car.

Except as he sits there, just as he predicted earlier, his mood takes a total nosedive. One second he's fine, the next he's obsessing about how Nat left him alone because she was more interested in Clint, and what's so interesting about Clint, anyway? Sure, he can hear better than Steve can, but Steve, drunk though he is, isn't too far gone to know with absolute certainty that Nat doesn't give a shit about how much Steve can or can't hear, so it must be that Clint actually has a better personality than Steve. And that's just not fair. Steve loves Natasha; he knows people think of him as friendly, but he's really not close to that many people. Natasha is usually so good about helping him get access to the social world: the few times they've had class together, she's made sure to be grouped with him in group projects so he can have a translator without having to request one from the school, and whenever Nat's brought a non-signing friend along to lunch with them, she gives him the play-by-play so he doesn't feel too left out of the conversation.

The flipside of her kindness, though, is that sometimes Steve is uncomfortably dependent on her. And that means it's scary to see her hanging out with someone else. What if Clint replaces him?

Someone taps him on the shoulder. _"Steve?"_

He looks up. And there he is. Bucky. God, when did he become so beautiful? Even in the shitty sodium streetlights, he looks like an angel, darkly haloed by his long hair. Fuck, Steve is so far gone. _"What are you doing here?"_ he signs, then grimaces. _"Fuck, sorry, I didn't mean it like that. I'm happy to see you. I'm sooooo... happy to see you."_

_"Wow. You_ are _drunk,"_ Bucky signs. He's making a weird, twisty face, like he's half-smiling despite himself.

_"A li'l bit._ " He frowns. _"I was sad."_

_"Okay, well, I came to walk you home."_

Right! Because Steve texted him! _"Bucky. Bucky. I didn't even remember texting you. You are so nice. You are so... you are... so... nice to me."_

Bucky's expression changes to mild discomfort. _"I think it's the other way around, to be perfectly honest."_ When Steve makes no real effort to stand, he comes forward and holds his hand out. Steve takes it and grapples himself to his feet. Bucky is surprisingly strong, easily withstanding Steve's wrestling for balance. Steve ends up plastered up against Bucky's side. He rests his head on Bucky's shoulder for a moment, then pulls away so he can sign, _"You didn't have to come get me."_

_"I was worried after you stopped texting back."_

_"How'd you even know where I was?"_

_"Asked Tony Stark. He had a good guess that it was this party because he knew Clint knows the guys that live here."_

_"You are a clever, clever man,"_ Steve says, grinning, and chucks Bucky on the shoulder lightly. Or maybe not that lightly. He can't really tell. Then he frowns. _"'M sorry. I didn't invite you to the party. I should've invited you. I didn't invite you and then I made you come get me in the middle of the night. Are you sad? Were you sleeping?"_

_"No, it's not that late. I was up playing video games."_

The thought that Steve had disturbed Bucky from playing video games is so utterly depressing that Steve doesn't say anything for a while. Somehow Bucky has managed to get the two of them moving, and they've been ambling back towards campus for a few blocks. Steve watches Bucky as Bucky stares at the full moon.

_"Nat left me alone,"_ Steve blurts out. He thinks he's drunk enough that he probably should stop himself right there, because if he keeps talking, he's definitely going to climb right into his feelings and stay in there, but he just doesn't care. He's doing it. He's making it happen.

_"Yeah, you told me in your text."_

_"Oh! I lost my phone."_

_"You what?"_ Bucky rolls his eyes. _"Never mind. We'll go get it in the morning. Don't worry about it now."_

_"Nat left me alone, and then I got drunk and then she was with Clint and I was sad so I went to the bathroom to decide what to do, and I left my phone in there and it's probably still there."_

Steve and Bucky are already pressed up against each other, because Steve wants to be as close to Bucky as physically possible and also keeps stumbling and forcing Bucky to catch him, but Bucky loops his arm around Steve's shoulders and gives him a quick hug. _"It's okay. You can talk to her in the morning. And we'll go get your phone. Want me to text it in case someone's found it, and tell them to drop it off at your dorm?"_

_"Don't care."_ Steve closes his eyes. _"She said she wasn't going to leave me alone, but she did."_

_"I'm sorry."_

_"I don't understand why she did that. She knows I can't talk to anyone else when it's that loud. But she just..."_

_"That must have been upsetting,"_ Bucky tries.

_"Yeah! It was!"_ Steve may be pouting. Slightly. Just a little bit.

_"I can see that."_ Steve remembers, very belatedly, that Bucky is really not good with emotional displays. _"It's okay. I mean, it's okay to be sad."_

_"Good. Because I am. I... Sometimes I... Sometimes I get so fucking... frustrated."_

_"With?"_

_"This,"_ Steve says, momentarily losing his train of thought and gesturing to literally everything: the stars in the sky, the dark college campus, the suburban roads surrounding it. _"Everything is unfair."_

_"I know."_

_"And I wish I could hear."_

Bucky stops, actually stops in the middle of the sidewalk. Steve carries on a few steps before stopping and turning back. _"You don't really mean that,"_ Bucky says, his expression pained.

_"No, I do. I wish I was normal. Cause then if Natasha left me at a party I could just find someone else to talk to. And--"_

_"Stop it."_ Bucky hesitates for a long time, then says, _"I like you how you are. If you could hear, you wouldn't know sign, and we would never have become friends."_

_"I could still learn sign to talk to you."_

_"Yeah, but you wouldn't."_ For a second, Bucky's expression turns bitterly angry, and Steve thinks, _Shit, I am way too drunk for this._ But Bucky locks whatever he was feeling away and continues: _"Even if you did learn sign, you wouldn't be fluent. Your Deafness brought us together. I'm thankful for that. But even if it hadn't, it's part of you, Steve, like my autism is a part of me. There would be no Bucky without autism. And I don't think there would be a Steve without this."_ He lightly touches Steve's hearing aid, looking into his eyes intently. _"And it would be a sad world without Steve Rogers."_

Holy. Shit.

_"I want to kiss you.,"_ Steve signs without thinking.

_"No, you don't. You're drunk."_

_"No, I really do. I really, really do. I've wanted to for... for forever."_

Bucky's brow furrows. He steps forward, well into Steve's personal space, and moves the hand at Steve's hear to rest on his jaw. _"Are you sure?"_ he signs one-handed.

Steve leans in and kisses him.

Their lips meet softly. Bucky's mouth is warm, rough, and he's tense for a second before he relaxes and lets Steve slip the tip of his tongue into his mouth. They share breath, and Bucky's hand moves to cup the back of Steve's head, gently, like he's afraid to hurt him.

The kiss sets his head spinning, beyond how drunk he is. He closes his eyes and sees galaxies behind his eyelids, losing himself in the kiss.

He pulls back after a few seconds, belatedly remembering that he had _just_ promised himself he wouldn't do anything outside the strictly platonic with Bucky. But, fuck it. YOLO. Bucky is beautiful, Steve wanted to kiss him, and he did. Everything is simple and nobody needs to be said. In fact, Steve isn't sure why he didn't just do that earlier. Now his feelings are out in the open, unless Sober Future Steve finds some way to play that off as a friendship kiss.

Who is he kidding? Sober Future Steve is a huge killjoy and he's _definitely_ gonna play it off as a friendship kiss. He's smart, too, so he'll totally be able to convince himself. Damn it. Well, that's a problem for Sober Future Steve to handle.

Bucky looks flustered, but not upset. However, he turns away from Steve quickly when the kiss ends. _"Come on, it's cold out. I'm supposed to be taking you home."_ Steve wants to protest, to stand under a streetlamp and kiss Bucky again, but his asthma is starting to play up from the cold, so he follows after Bucky.

Somehow they make it the rest of the way to the dorm building. Bucky pulls out his keys, but they're not anywhere near Steve's room. _"What're you doing?"_ He can tell he's kind of slurring his sign.

Bucky unlocks the door and pushes it open. _"You're too drunk for me to leave you alone. You can sleep here tonight."_ He nudges Steve into the room as Steve protests that he's not that drunk. He's never been in here before: Bucky has a single, decorated with fairy lights strung around the ceiling, and there's something like a lava lamp switched on atop Bucky's bookshelf, except instead of lava, there's a fountain of glitter inside, casting moving, winking spots of light all over the walls and ceiling. _Whoa._ Steve stares around at the light show as Bucky herds him into bed.

_"Where will you sleep?"_ he protests.

_"Floor."_

_"But--"_

_"Please just go to sleep,"_ Bucky says. He looks tired, and possibly annoyed with Steve for what has happened tonight. Steve feels the first hint of regret start in his stomach. Too cowed to argue, he lets Bucky push him down onto the mattress (not exactly how he wanted him to push him into the mattress, he thinks wryly) and untie his shoes and take them off carefully, then pull the covers up over him, and that's the last thing Steve remembers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> listen I love my friends but is there anything worse than when two of them get together and they're in the Gross Honeymoon Phase of their relationship... not that I've never done that but dang it sucks


	6. Chapter 6

It's past 9:30 in the morning by the time Steve shows signs of life. Bucky is getting started on his Real Analysis homework for the weekend, fiddling with LaTeX and sneaking glances at Steve, half out of concern and half out of sheer amazement at how long he's managed to sleep. Bucky's been up since half past six.

Normally it would piss Bucky off to have someone unexpectedly in his room this early in the morning. He hadn't exactly been thrilled to have been interrupted in his evening routine near midnight last night by Steve's drunk texts. Bucky's life runs on a tight schedule, and if someone changes his plans, even unimportant plans like playing a few hours of his favorite rhythm game before bed, it bothers the hell out of him.

On the other hand, he had been flattered to be the person Steve had texted when he was finding someone to get him out of a bad situation. It shows that Steve trusts him. Not many people feel that way about Bucky. Because of his disability, they tend to think of him as someone who needs help, not someone who can offer it. Ideally, last night wouldn't have happened at all, but he can admit to himself that, since it did happen, it had been kind of special to be the shoulder Steve leaned on, literally, on their way back to the dorm.

Steve rolls over and stares blearily at the ceiling. Bucky can practically see the gears turning in his head as he glances around, realizes he's not in his own room, then levers himself up on one elbow and catches sight of Bucky. His eyes widen. _"Oh, shit."_

_"It's alright. You are a disaster, though,"_ Bucky teases. He gestures towards a glass of water and two ibuprofen he left on the bedside table. Steve takes the water, but not the ibuprofen, which is probably a good sign.

_"I know,"_ he says after he downs it. _"Shit. I shouldn't have texted you."_

_"No, it's okay. You can always text me when you need help. Are you okay?"_

_"I don't know."_ He sits up and puts his face in his hands. He looks peaky, and sad if Bucky is reading him right, but otherwise okay. He seems to gather himself, then starts checking his pockets. _"Where's my phone?"_

Bucky grabs it off his desk and tosses it over to the bed. _"You left it at the party. Nat dropped it off earlier. I think you need to have a talk with her."_ He's turning into Bruce with all this communication and friendship stuff.

_"No, it's not her fault I'm a total wreck. I shouldn't have--"_

_"No, Steve, you said she told you she'd stay with you, and she didn't. You ended up stranded there completely shitfaced. You were in no shape to get home. It's not okay."_

Steve pushes his mouth to the side in one of his cute Steve expressions that Bucky thinks is cute even though he doesn't know what it means. But he doesn't say anything further.

He can't tell if Steve remembers kissing him last night. He shouldn't have let Steve do it. Steve initiated it, but he had been too drunk for anything new in their relationship to be a good idea. And the thing is, Bucky is pretty sure Steve doesn't realize that he's into him. Bucky's weird. It wouldn't surprise him if Steve couldn't tell his flirting from his friendliness. From what he's read, neurotypical flirting involves a lot of eye contact and particular kinds of touching. Bucky doesn't make a whole lot of eye contact. He does do a lot of touching, but he doesn't know how to show that it's flirtatious touching and not friendship touching. He's fine with his own style of relationships, but he also knows it takes people time to learn to read him.

Steve seems precocious in that regard--he can tell when Bucky's in a bad mood or nervous even before he shuts down or loses his ability to sign, and most people can't even do that reliably. He's even learned to read Bucky's happy stimming, which most people mistake for anxiety, excitement, or simply Bucky being annoying for no reason. Still, Bucky has no reason to believe that Steve has realized the attention he pays him is unusual. That Bucky, well, likes him.

So maybe Steve was kissing him as a friend, or on impulse. In college, people seem to kiss sometimes for no reason, especially when said people are drunk. Bucky really needs to try getting drunk at some point, so he can understand why. At any rate, he doesn't want to read too much into the kiss, and he doesn't want to bring it up to Steve in case Steve regrets it. Bucky probably has no chance with Steve, anyway. They _are_ both disabled, so Bucky can't disqualify himself on the sole basis of his autism, as he often does, but even so... Steve is cute, well-kept, wears button-down shirts even when he's not strictly required to, and he's sociable with lots of friends. Surely, even if he's into men, he has better prospects than Bucky.

Hell, maybe the reason he was so upset last night is that he was jealous of Nat. He could be into Clint himself. Bucky pulls a sour face at the thought.

No, he'll wait for Steve to bring it up. And if he doesn't, so be it.

* * *

 

Steve's heart pretty much stops when Dr. Hewitt, the geology professor, brings up the weekend camping trip at 8:07 a.m. on Monday because yes, despite the biweekly reminders, he hadn't written it down in his planner, and he's completely blindsided by the casual "We'll be passing around the sign-up sheet for partners in the two-person tents, so write your name down. It's just two nights, so don't think too hard."

He tries to catch Bucky's eye to silently ask him if he wants to share a tent, but Bucky seems especially distracted today, rhythmically kicking one leg of his chair and laser-focusing on the Tangle he's repeatedly stacking and un-stacking and re-stacking with one hand. Something in the room must be bothering him.

Of course the sign-up sheet comes to Steve before it gets to Bucky, because whoever got it first decided that passing it to the back row instead of across the front was a good idea. There's one tent that's still empty and two people have signed up without a partner. Steve decides to take his chances and puts his name down for the empty tent. He has no idea if Bucky thinks they're good enough friends to share a tiny tent for the night (granted, Steve did sleep in his bed last weekend, but not _with_ him, and it wasn't under the best of circumstances), or if he'd rather pair up with some random stranger he won't have to talk to, but he supposes he'll find out.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if Bucky signed up in another tent and left Steve with a random geology major, because Steve is starting to realize he has it pretty bad for Bucky. Like, really bad. Like, sometimes at night when he can't sleep, he pictures getting an apartment with Bucky and waking up and seeing his tangled hair every morning, and maybe jumping in the shower together, and then they go to the kitchen, which is bathed in sunrise light from the big bay windows he imagines, the window that doubles as a reading nook, and they make two cups of tea and sit at a breakfast bar together, and eat the same melon with different spoons, and--

Oh. maybe he should get his notebook out, because they're ten minutes into the lecture already. He's also pretty sure he just completely spaced out while the professor gave them the packing list for the trip. So that's great.

The point is, Natasha totally had his number when she started going on about Steve's little crush, and Steve's so far gone he can't even be mad about it. Bucky is out of this world. He makes Steve feel _seen_ ; he may not be great at reading body language or facial expressions, but damn if he isn't always trying his best to figure them out, and asking Steve constant, genuine questions about what he's feeling and what he's doing and why. He's curious, energetic, creative, kind. And he signs. He checks all of Steve's boxes and then also gets some of the bonus questions, too.

This isn't like Steve's stupid crushes in the past on unattainable, mean jocks that have ended in mild violence. (Yes, maybe he did fight one attractive volleyball player who turned out to be a rampant homophobe his freshman year and have to be bailed out by Natasha. And yes, it _had_ happened again with a different guy the next semester. But that was when Steve was young and dumb, like a whole six months ago! He's far more mature and smarter now.) Bucky's actually his friend. They're close. Intimately close.

Damn, now he's thinking about that stupid kiss the night he was drunk. Why did he have to do that? Even if Bucky _were_ interested, and Steve's not sure either way on that one, could he have gone about it in a more backwards way? He'd gone from practically crying on Bucky's shoulder (which all the men definitely find really attractive these days) straight to kissing without passing "Go", collecting $200, or explaining his feelings at all. Maybe Bucky thinks he kisses everyone when h's drunk. Steve wants to talk to him about it, and at the very least apologize, but he's too afraid to bring it up, because Bucky might call him out on being a huge, gay coward who's afraid to talk about his feelings.

He glances up at the clock. There are thirty minutes left in the lecture, and the sign-up sheet is face-down on the professor's desk, so he won't even have a chance to look at it after class. He whines to himself, and it must be louder than he thought, because Bucky jerks partway around in his seat to glance at him, and all Steve can manage is a sheepish smile.

He texts Bucky after class to ask him if they're signed up together, and the answer is a simple "of course". Reading it feels like letting out a breath.

* * *

 

_"Do you think I'll need nailclippers? I mean, I can just clip them now and--"_

_"Steve."_

_"But what if I get a hangnail and--"_

_"Steve. You're completely overthinking this."_

_"Yeah, I know,"_ Steve pouts. Nat is laughing at him as he stands over the half-full camping backpack his aunt sent him for the trip.

_"It's just a weekend. You're going to be fine. What's gotten into you today?"_

_"Bucky."_

Natasha raises an eyebrow. _"So you're admitting it now?"_

_"Well, it's not as if you didn't already know,"_ Steve says defensively.

_"I know, but you usually like to pretend you're just bros."_

_"Nat. I have to sleep next to him, all weekend long, in a two person tent. They're the size of..."_ He jumps up and demonstrates a width of about 3/4 of his twin bed. _"This!"_

_"Sounds sexy."_

_"Don't tease me. I'm terrified."_

_"Sorry, sorry."_ Natasha is laughing at him and visibly making no attempt to stop. Steve just crosses his arms and glares at her until she finally winds down. _"Listen, you're going to be fine. You two are friends, remember? You've stayed the night with him before. Twice. I'm still sorry about that, by the way."_

Steve waves a hand. _"Don't worry about it."_ The night after Natasha had left him at the party, after he'd gotten over his mild hangover and had some time to process his feelings, he had called her to his room and laid into her for ditching him. She had quickly agreed that what she had done was rude and apologized. Apparently she and Clint had started tentatively dating--actually dating, not just hooking up as she had with guys in the past--and it was going uncharacteristically well. She thought it might even turn into something long-term. It was unusual for her; she had never had a stable love life before, and she had gotten so caught up in her excitement and anxiety about it that she had neglected her duties to her best friend.

As soon as Nat called Steve her best friend, he was completely sold on the apology and they had made up. He wasn't sure he would be going out partying with her again anytime soon, though.

_"There's something else,"_ Steve added.

_"Spill."_

_"I think I... might have... kissed him that night I was drunk."_

Natasha slaps her hand over her mouth. _"You_ what?"

_"I mean, we were having this weird conversation where I was complaining about being Deaf--"_

_"You love being Deaf!"_

_"I was really drunk and having some feelings, okay? Anyway, that night it was kind of depressing."_

Nat winces. _"That's fair. Continue."_

_"He was talking about how my disabilities make me who I am, and they brought us together since we both sign, and then I... guess I kissed him."_

_"Was he okay with it?"_

_"I mean, yeah, he seemed fine. He didn't pull away or anything. But I don't know if it meant anything to him. He probably thought I was just drunk."_

_"Did you talk about it with him?"_

_"No, he hasn't brought it up."_

_"But you've still been hanging out with him since then."_

_"Of course."_

_"Then it can't be that much of a problem."_

Steve kicks his backpack. _"It's not a problem in the day when there's at least two feet of space between us. It might be a little more of a problem when we're trying to sleep practically spooning each other in a freezing desert."_

_"Sounds like a great opportunity for pure, innocent Steve Rogers to get some, to me,"_ Nat teases. Steve, scowling, doesn't even dignify that with a response. _"You done packing?"_

_"Yeah, I guess."_

_"Then let's go get food. I'm starving."_

Steve shoves a few last-minute things into various outside backpack pockets (lip balm, a bandanna). Despite Nat's attempts at reassurance, he's still nervous about the trip. Bucky has seemed a little off since that night, a little less talkative and open--more like the Bucky he first met at that disastrous group project meeting weeks ago. Steve doesn't like it. He wants the other Bucky back, the one he's close to, who trusts him.

Maybe the weekend camping trip will be an opportunity to find him again.


	7. Chapter 7

Bucky _knows_ Steve thinks he's mad at him.

Here's the thing. Bucky is autistic, but he's not oblivious. He's extremely, _uncomfortably_ self-aware of how he comes off to other people, whether he looks like an idiot without an ounce of charisma or a selfish bastard who doesn't care about anyone else, even when he really does. He tries to communicate clearly so people will know that even if he's not smiling, he enjoys hanging out with them, and just because he doesn't look people in the eyes, that doesn't mean he's not interested in what they're saying. Most of the time, it works pretty well. People who are willing to put up with his text-to-speech and various eccentricities are usually not too bothered about whether he shows his emotions with his face or with his words.

But he still makes mistakes. He still hangs out with Steve and ends up talking about his special interest in Dwarf Fortress for twenty minutes straight without letting him get a word in edgewise. He still sometimes goes to Bruce's room with his personal problems and forgets to let Bruce vent to _him_ , too (which is why he's always buying Bruce so much apology coffee). He forgets how sensitive Natasha is to sudden movements and freaks her out by slamming a hand down on the table in excitement.

Sometimes it seems like he lives his life bouncing straight from one social mistake to the next, constantly apologizing for living in a world that's too loud and moves too fast to let him ever catch up to where everyone else is and _rest_. At times it's frustrating. He's constantly surrounded by dizzying displays of color and light and sound, by the chaos of crowds and the incessant babbling of his one billion inner voices. When he speaks to people he has to hang onto their every word with both hands, constantly calculating which sounds he misheard and adjusting and readjusting the meaning of their sentences until they make sense. He hides away in his room and writes his little schedules that everyone finds so charming and ridiculous because the unpredictability of the world terrifies him, a person born less able to predict and understand it than most.

He likes being autistic. He wasn't lying when he told Steve that. He's willing to go through hours and hours of sensory hell to be able to _feel_ an orchestra playing the way he feels it, heightened to a point nobody with senses tuned within the normal range can experience. The autistic way he processes the world makes mathematics easy for him; his drive to exert tight control over his environment and daily life makes him a reliable, trustworthy person who always keeps appointments and arrives on time. There are a hundred traits he gets from his autism that he wouldn't give up for the world, that make him who he is.

But damn, does it _suck_ sometimes.

Case in point: He and Steve are in the van right now for the geology camping trip. He tried so hard to be in a good mood for it. Things have been weird between him and Steve, and he didn't want to exacerbate things by being anxious and jumpy for the trip. He wrote the dates into his planner at the beginning of the semester so it wouldn't catch him by surprise; he packed two days ago to make sure he wouldn't forget anything; he finished all his homework that was due Monday (even Real Analysis) so he wouldn't have to worry about it over the weekend. He remembered his thick winter jacket, as the residual heat of autumn was beginning to fade into a gray winter.

Despite his best efforts, he ended up overwhelmed anyway. For one thing, geology lecture had been canceled that morning so that he and his classmates wouldn't have to go to lecture and meet back up for the trip just a few hours later. But that had screwed up his morning routine. He couldn't sleep in past six because he _always_ got up at six on Fridays and he wasn't about to stop now. He had spent the extra hour finishing up his Real Analysis proofs, but he had been in a cold sweat the whole time, panicking over the idea that geology lecture somehow _hadn't_ been canceled after all and he was inadvertently skipping it.

He ended up pulling up the email from Professor Hewitt that said class was canceled on his laptop and glancing at it every time he was too anxious to focus on math, checking the dates in the email against the date shown on his computer in an effort to convince himself that yes, it really was Friday, November 18th, and he really was supposed to be working on Real Analysis instead of listening to a lecture on plate tectonics, despite the fact that the previous fifteen Fridays, he'd been in lecture at this hour.

He had gone to the dining hall to eat lunch, but his earplugs had slipped through the hole in the pocket of his favorite jeans, the ones that were starting to fall apart but he couldn't bear to part with. He got so worked up by the noise of the cafeteria (why the hell did they think it necessary to play dance music in a cafeteria?) that he left before he had eaten enough.

Then he had returned home and wasted an hour checking and re-checking the things he had packed fro the trip against the packing list, because he felt stupid and slow and unable to retain any information long enough to satisfy himself that he was, indeed, packed, and he'd had to run to catch the van because he was so afraid of forgetting something important he was almost in tears and had, as a result, lost track of time.

Now he's in the van, and Steve is next to him, trying to chat with him and cheer him up, and Bucky is barely responding because he can barely understand what Steve is signing because his brain is completely fried. He wishes he could at least apologize to Steve for his recent distance, and explain to him that this time of the semester, with midterms approaching and the days growing shorter and darker, is always hard for him. He's been terse with everyone lately; Steve hasn't done anything wrong in specific. But he can't find the energy to put all those words in a row in a way Steve will understand.

The campsite, when they finally reach it, is gorgeous and peaceful. They pull up to a cluster of tent sites on the edge of a conifer forest bordering on a gorge cut by a rushing river. There are no other campers around; these are state lands and it's the off-season, so there aren't even rangers to direct them to the water pumps and outhouses. When they get out of the van and the engine cuts out, the only sounds, besides the obnoxious chatter of the other students, are the wind through the trees and the river echoing up through the gorge, just visible beyond the edge of the trees. Bucky tries to relax, focusing on the nature sounds and mashing his Tangle with his fingers in his pocket. It's not really working.

As the professor starts dividing up tasks, Steve drops back in the knot of students to where Bucky is standing, a few feet behind the rest of the group. He's grinding the heel of one of his boots into the ground in frustration. _"Hey. You alright?"_

_"I can't..."_ Bucky signs, and that's as far as he can get before whatever machinery runs from his brains to his hands and lets him sign stops working entirely. He whines wordlessly, so frustrated he could cry, and drops his Tangle into the dirt to slam the heel of one of his hands into his opposite forearm. The dull pain is grounding, cutting through the noise around him and focusing his scattered attention onto just _one_ thing. It eases the discomfort for a moment. He hits himself again, but when he pulls back to do it a third time, Steve catches his wrist, gently encircling it with his fingers. He's barely touching Bucky, yet it stops him. Bucky curls over into himself and whines again, drawing stares from the other students; he can't help it, the quivery feeling he has inside needs an outlet...

Steve pushes Bucky's hand down and towards his pants pocket. Bucky tucks it inside. _"Come here,"_ Steve says, scooping Bucky's Tangle up off the ground, and starts pulling Bucky back into the woods, away from the other students. He says something unintelligible to the professor, who nods and waves them off.

They walk together to the point where the campsite fades into dense forest. Some of the tension leaves Bucky as the professor's speech fades behind them. When the stress drains away, he's left feeling hollow and shaky, but it's easier to breathe.

_"Better?"_ Steve signs, cautiously guiding Bucky with a hand on his shoulder.

_"A little,"_ he manages. Steve stops, placing Bucky up against a tree, and Bucky slides down to crouch at the base of it, closing his eyes and pressing his face with his hands. He doesn't know how he's going to get through the rest of the evening, trying to pitch a camp with a bunch of college students who have probably never seen a tent before. It's going to be so chaotic and frustrating and loud.

At least he's tenting with Steve. Steve won't make fun of him if he does something dumb or needs ridiculously specific instructions in order to figure the tent out, which undoubtedly he will, since he hasn't been camping in years. Not since he was a kid and his mom used to take him.

Steve hands his Tangle back; he rubs the dirt off and starts worrying at it again. It'll scare Steve if he hurts himself any more, but he really wants to feel something strong right now, something on his skin. He tries pressing back into the rough tree bark; that helps a little. Sometimes when he gets like this, his skin crawling with the need for strong input, he rolls around on the floor to get the bad feeling off him, but unless he wants to spend the rest of the evening picking pine needles out of his hair and clothes, that's not an option.

He opens his eyes. _"Can you..."_ he starts to ask Steve, but then he stops. Normal people don't want what he's about to request. Maybe he should keep it to himself.

_"Whatever you need."_ Steve signals him to continue.

_"Can you... press down on my shoulders?"_

When Steve doesn't respond right away, Bucky guides his hands to his shoulders and pulls him down so he's resting most of his weight on Bucky. Bucky lets his head fall back. He and Steve are almost nose to nose, so he cuts his gaze off to the side. Steve's expression is weird, and Bucky can see in his peripheral vision that he's blushing. He probably finds this strange, but Bucky is too tired to care right now.

He heaves a deep sigh. The pressure helps, but no matter what he does to calm himself right now, the tension will ratchet right back up as soon as he returns to the rest of the class. He needs at least a few hours to himself to feel completely right again, and he probably won't get that until Sunday, so he might as well pull himself together and go back to class now and at least make an effort at participating. He pushes Steve off him gently and accepts a hand to help him up. _"Let's go. I'm okay now."_ Steve loops his arm around Bucky's waist, and they walk back to the rest of the students together.

* * *

 

Bucky's not particularly talkative as they set up the tent, but at least he doesn't look like he wants to crawl out of his skin anymore.

Steve has never been camping before; his health was too fragile as a kid for anyone to want to let him out of their heavily filtered and air-conditioned house. Setting up a tent is easier than expected. He surreptitiously admires Bucky's shoulder muscles as he hammers the stakes into the ground.

There's cooking and eating, and at that point in the evening the other students have calmed down a little, and the sun is starting to set. Steve and Bucky can sit side-by-side and exist together, watching sparks fly up from the fire intermittently, and that seems to calm Bucky down further. All too soon people are crawling into their sleeping bags with books and flashlights.

Bucky takes the back half of the tent, so he goes in first, slipping his shoes off outside, and starts to undress by the light of a little electric lantern he thought to bring. Steve follows him in, his heart beating hard. He really tries not to watch and fails completely. Bucky strips down to a tight, tight pair of black boxer briefs that hide nothing and _holy shit_ is Steve glad Bucky is facing away from him because he has the ass of a god. They're really bonding on this stupid camping trip, if you can call Steve lusting after Bucky so hard his brain might have turned to a liquid "bonding".

Eventually Bucky glances at him and Steve remembers himself and changes into boxers and a t-shirt, and they both wriggle into their sleeping bags and settle down.

The tent has grown warm from their body heat. Settled lying next to each other, with only the muted light from the lantern between them casting odd shadows across their faces, reminds Steve of childhood sleepovers and the illicit thrill of being awake late into the night. He remembers how the darkness would embolden him to talk about fears he never would disclose in the daylight. Back then, before he'd found an effective treatment for his asthma, he'd never been sure if his next attack would be his last... if this time he wouldn't make it through his regular winter bout of pneumonia or bronchitis.

He shakes himself out of his dark thoughts. Grasping for a different topic to talk about, he asks Bucky, _"Do you get like that often?"_

_"Get like what?"_

_"You know, like earlier, when you were all..."_ He waves a hand around.

_"Oh, that."_ Bucky shrugs and grimaces. _"About once a week. Well, maybe not that often."_

_"It didn't look fun."_

_"It's not that bad. I should have been able to avoid it. I made a ton of mistakes."_

_"What mistakes?"_

_"Fuck, I don't know,"_ he says. _"I should have told you earlier that I wasn't up to talking and tried to calm down on the bus. Usually when this happens it's from sounds in lecture. I don't have disability accommodations, so the professors won't know what I'm doing if I leave class, so I end up trying to stick it out..."_

_"Wait, why don't you have accommodations?"_

_"My diagnosis is expired. As if people stop being autistic if they don't see a neuropsychologist every five years."_

_"That sucks."_

He shrugs. _"I could get it renewed, but that's difficult. I'm a legal adult, so I have to make my own appointments to get re-evaluated. But I can't talk on the phone, and not every office responds to email. I can drive but it's hard and tiring, and if I get pulled over by the police and don't talk to them, or try to get my phone out of my pocket so I can use text-to-speech..."_

_"Jesus."_

_"Yeah. So it's easier just to power through. I'm lucky that I can do that. I find ways to make it work."_ He smiles at Steve. _"Having awesome friends helps."_

_"Stop. You're flattering me."_

_"Maybe you deserve it,"_ Bucky says, and winks.

* * *

Bucky is in high spirits the next morning. He and Steve talked late into the night by the lantern light, until the battery had started to gutter and they could hardly see each other signing anymore. It was difficult to sleep in the tent; he could hear pine trees groaning against each other when the wind blew through the campsite, earning it its name of "Singing Pines Park", and some student snoring so loudly Bucky could hear it from his own tent. But he was so tired he managed to drop off anyway, eventually.

He wakes with the sunrise and crawls over Steve, who's still asleep face-down in his pillow. When he gets out of the tent, the campsite is quiet. The rest of the students are still asleep. The fire has burned down, but he can still smell hints of woodsmoke and ash. Over near the canyon, a flaming sunrise lights up the clouds.

He watches the sunrise quietly at the edge of the canyon. As he gazes out, listening to the echoes of the river far below him, he forgets everything he was tense about yesterday.

Their task for today is to go down to the river--without the professor, who seems to be treating the whole camping trip as a vacation from teaching--and photograph the striations in the rock, collect rock samples to test and identify later, and, for bonus points, look for and identify fossils. After Steve wakes up and they both dress and have eggs with the rest of the students, they set out of the river. Steve leads down a convenient, albeit rickety, set of graying wooden stairs bolted to the rocks that all the students walk down to get to the river. The sun isn't burning off the morning's chill. Bucky tugs his coat tighter against the frigid wind.

The canyon's orange-red striations are gorgeous, like the swirling colors of Jupiter. The roar of the river is much louder here. One would have to raise their voice to talk over it, but it's no problem for Bucky and Steve. They walk downriver to a small plateau that juts out over the water where there are convenient loose pebbles they can collect. Bucky gets out the sample bags, Steve the camera, and they pick up rocks from the riverbank for a time in silence. The water is a deep, churning torrent, probably fed by a recent snowfall in this region that didn't reach them at college. The swirls of blue and white mesmerize Bucky. He has to stop himself from wasting time staring at it instead of collecting rock samples.

As he's labeling one of the plastic bags, a smooth, ribbed curl in the rock wall of the canyon catches his eye. He leaves Steve trying to photograph the underside of the plateau and goes to investigate. It's the imprint of a little shell embedded in the rock. He glances back at Steve. Bucky doesn't need any extra credit in this class, but maybe Steve does. He frowns at the fossil, trying to figure out how to pry it out of the rock, and he's just about set his chisel when he hears a quiet splash.

When he turns back around, Steve is gone.

Bucky's heart stops. He rushes to the lip of the plateau, and it doesn't take long for him to realize that Steve has fallen in. Before he can even think about it, Bucky jumps off the plateau after him.

Immediately several facts become clear. For one thing, he has grossly underestimated the strength of the current. He's immediately pulled off his feet and just barely manages to catch himself in the knee-deep water, landing on his hands and knees. Spray from the water battering his limbs laves his face. He tries to scramble to his feet, scraping his arms and legs on the rocks.

Steve is a few feet away from him where the river is deeper, struggling--he clearly can't swim, which might have been helpful to know _before_ this happened--but it's almost impossible to get to him when the current is trying to suck Bucky downstream himself. He digs his fingers into the rocks under him and shuffles sideways towards Steve, water lapping around his mouth and nose. It's so cold he can hardly feel what he's doing underwater.

When Bucky's almost close enough to grab him, Steve loses his grip on whatever he was clinging to and gets swept downriver faster than Bucky could have imagined possible.

He lets go of the rocks and swims after him.

What follows is possibly the most terrifying five minutes of Bucky's life up to this point. He's a strong swimmer, so even weighed down by his clumsy winter clothing, swallowing water and barely staying afloat, he manages to catch up to Steve and grab Steve's wet jacket with his numb fingers. Steve is too disoriented to move at all, by now, so Bucky has to drag both of them sideways, across the current, until he can grab onto another rock and finally stop their unanticipated trip downriver. He braces himself against the rock, maneuvering Steve face up. Steve is coughing violently, so hard he must be barely breathing.

He wedges his foot between two rocks to make sure they won't drift any farther downstream before heaving Steve more upright in the water to get his face entirely clear of the spray. This doesn't seem to help at all. Steve's lips are turning blue, either from the cold or lack of oxygen. _"Inhaler?"_ Bucky manages to sign one-handed.

He's not sure how Steve can even see him signing, but he signs back weakly, _"In my jacket."_

Bucky considers trying to get it out immediately, but if he drops it in the river they'll _really_ be screwed. He needs to get them both on dry land first. That's another trial. The foot Bucky has wedged between the rocks gave him enough stability to keep them both from drowning, but now it's crammed in there pretty firmly, and he's getting more and more numb by the second, so he can't really feel where it is. He jars it free with brute force. On his back in the water, with one arm bracing Steve, he manages to sort of crabwalk close enough to the shore that the current weakens. Steve starts moving on his own and drags himself up onto the shore. Bucky's so cold he's not even shivering anymore.

He opens three of Steve's jacket pockets before he finally finds the inhaler. Steve has briefed him on how to use it, thank god, so he gets the business end in Steve's mouth, presses the trigger, and holds Steve's hand while he tries to hold his breath.

Steve only manages a fraction of a second before he breaks off coughing again. They go through the routine twice more, but it hardly seems to be doing anything. Steve is still choking on nothing, and in Bucky's estimation, he's not managing to hold his breath long enough to actually absorb the medication. Bucky's starting to panic. _"Is it hospital time?"_ he signs.

Steve's eyes are closed and he nods weakly.

Bucky drags him upright and they start stumbling together towards the stairs, but it's going really slowly and Steve is barely moving. It doesn't take long for Bucky to get frustrated with that and crouch down. He maneuvers Steve into a fireman's carry and presses back up to standing. Lifting Steve isn't easy, but once he's draped over his back he's not that difficult to carry. Bucky stumbles over the rocks, thankful he's still wearing his soaking-wet hiking boots, and pretty soon they're back at the bottom of the wooden stairs.

He makes the mistake of looking all the way back up to the lip of the canyon. It looks unbelievably far away. He snaps his attention back down to the first stair. Steve is convulsing on his back with his efforts to breathe. Bucky tries to adjust his weight, but it doesn't help that much.

He starts going up the stairs. The first dozen or so aren't that bad. The next dozen are difficult. He's shivering violently now, so hard it's difficult to walk. The last few dozen steps are excruciating. He has no idea what happens between halfway up the staircase and stepping out onto the edge of the canyon, only that he manages it somehow.

He stumbles over the last step, barely catching himself on the railing. Steve is still coughing, which means he's still breathing, which is a very good thing. He half-runs through the woods, barreling towards Dr. Hewitt, the sole person left at the campsite. He panics again when he realizes he and Steve both were carrying their cellphones down by the river. Bucky's is cold in his pocket, undoubtedly dead, which means he has no way of communicating with his professor. He runs up to Hewitt and gently lets Steve down from his back; Steve stumbles, doubled over and coughing.

As soon as Hewitt catches sight of them, he says something Bucky is pretty sure, through the haze of panic preventing him from thinking straight and the deafening ringing in his ears, is a swear and pulls his phone out, hustling Bucky and Steve back into the school van. He disappears for a minute, then shoves a bunch of sleeping bags back there with them. He's trying to give Bucky instructions Bucky can't understand; Bucky is distracted by the pain of his shoulder un-tensing now that Steve is off his back.

By the time he's got control of his arms again, Hewitt has driven them at a breakneck pace back out to the highway and is presumably headed for the nearest hospital. Bucky peels Steve's jacket and shirt off. He's settled down into erratic wheezing, just as alarming as the coughing was, but Bucky can't think of anything more helpful to do than get him out of his wet clothes. He fumbles with Steve's tightly knotted, soaked shoelaces for so long he almost starts crying. For some reason he's fixated on the shoelaces, like if he doesn't get the shoelaces undone, something terrible is--

Steve puts a cold hand over his own to get his attention and painstakingly signs, _"It's okay. Calm down."_

Bucky doesn't respond, but he does take one deep, shaking breath. Finally his fingernails find purchase in the knot and one of Steve's shoes comes off, then the next. He gets Steve down to his wet boxers and pushes one of the sleeping bags at him. Steve lays down on his side. He signs _"Inhaler?"_ again, and Bucky gets it out for him, but Bucky's shivering violently, way too badly to help Steve. Steve somehow manages to get the inhaler out of his hands and take another two puffs on his own.

Bucky tries to strip his own wet clothes off, but he's too exhausted to get very far. He gets his shirt off and flings it down into the footwell, but he takes one look at his hiking boots and gives up on his pants entirely, opting instead to hold Steve's hand and watch him as they pull into the parking lot of a rural ER.

To say it doesn't take long to get Steve admitted is an understatement. Bucky helps him out of the car as Dr. Hewitt runs ahead into the waiting room, and only a minute later Steve is being wheeled away in a wheelchair by a phalanx of nurses. He trails after Steve for a good twenty or thirty feet across the parking lot, shirtless, still dripping wet, and limping a little where his ankle got trapped in the rocks, before a turns back and stops him. She starts talking to him. He steps back and shakes off her grip, but she makes it clear she won't let him follow Steve. He looks around for Dr. Hewitt, hoping he'll explain that Bucky doesn't speak, but he's gone, having apparently disappeared into the building. Without much optimism he signs that he needs an interpreter.

The nurse nods and talks some more. He's slowly getting his ability to understand speech back, at least. She's asking if he can hear her at all, and he nods and mimes writing on a notepad. It takes her a second to understand, but then she gets out a prescription pads and scribbles down, _Come inside and warm up._

He nods and she leads him stumbling into the waiting room. His professor is at the front desk, signing paperwork. The nurse sits him down in a chair in the triage corner, near a blood-pressure machine, and leaves him there. He curls in on himself. The hospital is heated, but the heat takes a long time to penetrate and warm him up. He wants to make sure Steve is okay--did they get him whatever medication he needs?--but he can't even ask about him without his phone or an interpreter. There are pens and paper at the front desk, but he definitely doesn't have the manual dexterity to write right now.

The nurse from before--well, probably the same nurse; it's a redhead--comes back with a dry hospital gown. She motions towards a bathroom and asks him to put it on. He kicks his feet out and points at the laces. Like a miracle, she understand and unknots his right boot and pulls it off, frowning when she sees that his feet are practically gray from cold. She starts on his left shoe, which belongs to the foot he had wedged into the rocks when he was trying to get Steve out of the water. As soon as she puts her hands on it he realizes how tender it is. He hisses and draws it back.

The nurse pulls it forward again, talking quietly and moving more carefully, and unpicks the knot. He grips the arms of the crappy waiting-room chair and stares at the ceiling, gritting his teeth as she eases the boot off. Everything goes fuzzy for a moment. She's palpating it with her hands, and it's not particularly painful, at least not as numb as he is, but it makes him lightheaded and queasy. He checks out and stops responding to her, tilting his head back and closing his eyes.

He doesn't move until he starts feeling like he might pass out. Then he puts his head between his knees. There's a blood pressure cuff strangling his right arm; he's not sure how it got there. A thermometer clicks loudly in his ear. He's losing track of what's going on around him.

For some reason, he's put in a wheelchair. He keeps his head bowed forward and grips the arms as he's wheeled back into the hospital. He's excited because he thinks they're taking him to Steve, then confused when he's deposited on a bed in an empty room, with no sign of Steve anywhere. Then, at fucking _last_ , a sign interpreter shows up.

As soon as he realizes the man can sign, he rattles off, _"Where's Steve? Is he okay? Is he going to die? Where did they take him?"_

_"The boy you came with?"_

_"Yes!"_

The interpreter consults with the nurse, who's back to messing with Bucky's ankle. _"He's been stabilized. He's going to be okay. Are you an immediate family member?"_

_"No._ " Wait, fuck, he should have said they were brothers. Too late now. _"His family are hours away, though. I'm the only person he knows here. You have to let me see him."_

The interpreter just nods. _"Can you tell me what happened to you?"_

_"I want to see Steve."_

_"I understand that. Let me back up. You're being admitted for--"_

_"What? But I'm fine. Steve's the one who was hurt."_

_"Your ankle might be fractured, you're slightly hypothermic, and you're covered in abrasions. There's also the cut on your shin."_

_"The what?"_

Bucky looks down to find that the nurse is, in fact, cleaning a long cut on his shin, just below the knee. It's surprisingly deep, bleeding into the sheets. So that's why his leg was throbbing. He had assumed it was just the cold. Now that he's looking at it he can feel it stinging. A nervous laugh bubbles out of him.

_"The faster you tell me what happened, the faster we'll be able to treat and release you to see your friend again,"_ the interpreter prompts.

He hurries up and gives an abridged version of the story.

_"What happened to your foot, exactly?"_

_"I twisted my ankle in the river. It's fine. It doesn't even hurt."_

_"Okay,"_ the interpreter signs skeptically. He's been passing info back and forth with the nurse, who's taking notes on a pad. _"We'll get you treated as soon as possible. But we're going to want to take x-rays of your foot and ankle to make sure nothing's broken. There will be a wait for the machine."_

Bucky flings himself back against the pillows with an eloquent groan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> listen guys... would it really be me if there wasn't at least ONE major whump scene


	8. Chapter 8

It takes _hours_ for Bucky to be discharged, actual hours, during which nobody will tell him anything about where Steve is and whether or not he's okay.

The nurses treat him for mild hypothermia, which consists of wrapping him in a truly unnecessary amount of blankets and making him drink large amounts of horrible black tea. They clean and bandage the cut on his shin (they decide it doesn't need stitches, thank God). Then there's the promised several-hour wait for the x-ray machine. He has no entertainment with him; someone has left his dead, wet phone on an end table within his reach, as if to mock him, along with his keys and the tangle that had been in his pocket. He tries to sleep for a while, then chews on the edge of the student card (normally he tries not to do that, because he knows from experience that he _will_ eventually shred it to the point where he'll have to buy a new one, but these are extenuating circumstances), fiddles with his Tangle, fiddles with the student card, chews on the Tangle, and gets yelled at for pacing up and down the hallway outside his room with his sprained ankle.

He's taken from his room for the x-ray, then returned to wait for the results. He dozes until a doctor informs him that nothing seems to be fractured; the offending ankle is wrapped thickly in elastic (which is a total anticlimax given how much of a deal the people made of it), and his body temperature, blood pressure, and blood oxygen are checked about a billion times before _finally_ he's discharged. It's a lot of drama considering that Steve is the one who actually _needed_ to be in the hospital. They could have just as well sent Bucky to sit with Steve for a few hours; he would have warmed up on his own eventually, and his ankle doesn't even hurt that bad.

Bucky manages to stay relatively calm through all of that nonsense. But when they send him back out to the waiting room, telling him to keep the gown he's wearing and giving him a bag with his wet clothes and shoes inside, and leave him there without any news about Steve, he falls apart. He doesn't last five minutes before he's up and writing back and forth with the front desk man, asking if they expect him to just _wait_ here while Steve is back there having god-knows-what done to him (they do), asking if there's any way he can be shown to Steve's room (there's not), asking if he can call Steve on the phone (what exactly Bucky thinks he's going to do with the phone, he's not sure, since he's mute and Steve's deaf, but he figures if they acquiesce he'll figure _something_ out) or send him a message.

To this last request the front desk man finally acquiesces. Bucky writes Steve a note in his best handwriting (which is still spidery and horrible--he hopes Steve is a good interpreter):

_Hi Steve, I hope you are okay. Im sorry I didnt get you out of the river faster. I hope you will forgive me for not paying attention. The doctors arent letting me go back and see you even though I asked a lot of times and I cant think of any other way to get back there but if I think of one I will come right away._ ~~_Try to get discharged soon or they might make me go home without you._ ~~ _Ill see you as soon as possible hope they gave you an interpreter, they gave me one but it took a while. Dont worry about geology I will figure it out and talk to the professor or go back to the canyon if we still need more rocks (dont know what happened to the samples I took because I left my jacket with them in the pocket by the river). See you soon hopefully, love Bucky_

He doesn't read it over, just hands it back to the front desk man, who hands it off to a nurse.

He limps back over to the waiting area, trembling inside with excess energy. Dr. Hewitt isn't here; Bucky, in fact, has no idea where he is. He actually has Hewitt's number pre-programmed into his phone, but again, his phone is destroyed, so he can't text him to find out.

After another five minutes, he can't bear the thought of staying in the waiting room any longer. He wanders out the front doors to the sidewalk, where he's surprised to find Hewitt smoking, leaning up against the wall of the hospital.

He's so embarrassed to have dragged this poor man all the way out to the hospital for an entire day while the students back at the camp are undoubtedly learning nothing about geology that he almost turns around and goes right back inside just to avoid talking to him, but before he can do so, Dr. Hewitt frowns at him. "I'm glad to see that you're okay, but you really shouldn't be out here yet."

Bucky, annoyed at how people can't seem to remember that he's nonverbal for more than four seconds at a stretch, mimes typing on a phone with his hands, then gets out his own phone (which somehow produces several drops of water from deep within the case, for dramatic effect) to show the professor that it's dead. Hewitt makes an "Oh, that," sound and hands Bucky the notes app on his own cell phone.

_Have you seen Steve?_

"Yes, briefly. He's fine," Hewitt reassures him. "He had a pretty serious asthma attack, but apparently this is fairly normal for him. They put him on oxygen and a nebulizer and gave him a cocktail of different medications, and he's almost back to normal now. Just gave us a bit of a scare. The doctors kicked me out of his room so he could get some rest."

_Will we go back to the campsite when he gets discharged?_

Hewitt laughs. "I think not. We're only a few hours from campus. I'll drop the two of you back at the dorms, then return to finish the trip with the other students."

Bucky closes his eyes, trying to process this. Hewitt takes the opportunity to snuff out his cigarette and herd him back inside, saying something about how Bucky will lose toes if he stays out barefoot much longer. The waiting room is the last place he wants to be right now, but he allows himself to be moved. A fresh wave of exhaustion hits him when he sits down. Hewitt disappears for a minute and comes back with cup of decaf coffee for Bucky. Bucky takes it just for something to do, and then they wait some more.

It only takes about fifteen minutes this time before Steve is wheeled out in a chair. Bucky springs up, accidentally putting his full weight down on his injured foot, winces, and limps over to him, signing _"Happy"_ over and over again as he leans down to carefully hug him. The adults (well, technically Bucky and Steve are adults, but the _real_ adults) are talking over their heads; the gist of what they're saying is that Steve is alright and they can both go home now, and everything is still horrible, but the horribleness is largely mitigated by the joyous chant in his head of _Steve's back Steve's back Steve's back!_ and Bucky thinks he can live with that.

* * *

They don't talk much on the car ride back. Steve's still pretty tired and out of it, but he's still aware of Bucky giving him nervous looks from the other side of the bench seat in the back of the van.

_"You probably saved my life today,"_ Steve says, since it doesn't seem like anyone else is going to acknowledge it.

_"We might fail geology,"_ Bucky responds sadly. Steve laughs at him.

_"Bucky, I don't give a shit. You're amazing."_

_"Thank you,"_ he signs flatly. He's fidgeting nervously with his Tangle.

_"Come here,"_ Steve says.

Bucky leans towards him tentatively, and Steve gets his arms around him. Without much warning, Bucky collapses into Steve's lap, going limp with his face buried in Steve's thigh. His back and shoulders are shaking, and in a few seconds Steve feels tears seeping through the hospital gowns he's still wearing.

He rubs Bucky's back in slow circles, until he cries himself out and they both fall asleep.

* * *

 

Bucky wakes up the next morning to fingers running softly through his hair.

He keeps his eyes close for a moment as he gets his bearings. He and Steve both went to sleep in Bucky's room last night, in his bed. It takes him a moment to work backwards and remember why. Yesterday's events seem like a weird dream.

He wonders if he should get up and start his day. He doesn't think he even set an alarm to wake him up this morning, and he _never_ goes to sleep without setting an alarm. He should be rushing to start his morning routine. But he figures he can stay here for a few more minutes, at least; he had cleared his Sunday schedule in preparation for the camping trip, anyway, so it's not like there's anywhere he has to be.

Finally he opens his eyes. Steve disentangles his hand from Bucky's hair. Bucky makes a low noise of complaint and nudges Steve's hand with his head; Steve obediently goes back to what he was doing earlier. It feels heavenly. Bucky almost purrs when he scratches his scalp.

After a time, Bucky rolls over to sign, _"Steve, tell me the truth. Are we going to fail geology?"_

_"Buck, no,"_ Steve laughs.

_"But we lost the samples, screwed up the camping trip, and broke Dr. Hewitt's camera, and we're skipping the lecture he's going to give today,"_ Bucky points out. The camera had been in Bucky's hand when he had jumped into the river after Steve; it's long gone by now.

_"If he tries to fail you for this, I'll personally kick his ass myself,"_ Steve promises. _"I'll go right to the provost. It was my fault, anyway. I'll tell her you had nothing to do with it."_

_"It wasn't your fault."_

_"I should have--"_

_"Steve, come on. Don't be ridiculous. It's over with now, anyway."_ He drops his hands and curls up into Steve's side, closing the topic.

_"Listen, Bucky..."_ Steve starts, but he trails off. Bucky looks up at him inquisitively. _"When I had asthma attacks as a kid, I used to get scared that I was going to die without having said my last words to my friends and my mom. I know what they feel like now and I'm used to it; I know it probably won't kill me. But yesterday really freaked me out, and I--"_

_"I won't let anything happen to you,"_ Bucky cuts in.

_"Thanks. That means a lot to me. But what I was going to say was that yesterday, I realized I want to take the chance while I have it to tell you that I love you._ "

This takes Bucky by surprise, which is stupid, because he's spent hours daydreaming about Steve saying exactly that. He just never thought it would actually _happen_.

He must have actually managed to convince himself that Steve's kiss from the other day was platonic, or some kind of drunken mistake, because he's completely blindsided by the confession. He's not the world's best reader of facial expressions, but he can tell by Steve's serious face that he's not about to follow up with "as a friend" or something dumb like that. He grasps for something to say, but the words he needs to convey the depth of what he feels for Steve Rogers are out of reach.

_"It's okay if you don't feel the same way,"_ Steve continues. _"I love being friends with you, and I wouldn't want you to feel pressured into anything. But I can't pretend anymore that this is totally platonic for me. I just wanted--"_

_"I love you too,"_ Bucky finally says.

They stop and stare at each other.

_"Oh. I... do you want to be boyfriends?"_ Steve asks tentatively.

_"Yes."_

_"Okay. Then I'm going to take you on a date. I'm going to court you. Properly."_

It's such a dorky, Steve way to put it. _"Yes!"_ Bucky says, grinning.

Steve is grinning back, and then he groans. _"Oh, god, I'm going to have to break the news to Nat. I'm never going to hear the end of this. She totally called it. Fuck."_

Bucky laughs, cackling until he's breathless and there are tears in his eyes.

Then he kisses Steve, because he can.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for giving this silly little project a shot :) your crit and feedback is super helpful to me so leave a comment if you have the time!
> 
> if you want to see my behind-the-scenes writing disastrousness my blog is singular (hyphen) they on the ol' Tumbly. That blog is mostly original writing though!


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